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영어

Alginate is a gelling polysaccharide found as a major constituent of the cell wall and intracellular material in the brown seaweeds, Macrocystis, Laminaria and Ascophyllum. Alginate is also produced with O-acetylated form by two genera of Pseudomonas and Azotobacter. Alginate has been widely used in the food, textile, printing, and chemical industries because of its molecular properties. For the purposes of specific physical and biochemical properties, short length alginate, oligoalginate can be obtained by acid hydrolysis or alginate lyases. Alginate is a complex copolymer of α-L-guluronate (G) and its C5 epimer -D-mannuronate (M), arranged as homopolymeric G blocks, M blocks, random heteropolymeric G/M blocks (Wong et al. 2000). Alginate lyases, also known as alginases or alginate depolymerases, catalyze the degradation of alginate by a -elimination mechanism. Although most organisms produce one alginate lyase with high substrate specificity, some bacterial strains produce several alginate lyases with different substrate specificities (polymannuronate lyase, EC 4.2.2.3 and polyguluronate lyase, 4.2.2.11). Alginate lyase from Alteromonas sp. H-4 showed alginate degrading activity on broad range substrates. Alginate lyases from marine and bacterial sources have been applied successfully to the extraction of protoplasts for food research and regeneration of a variety of algal species (Boyen et al. 1990).The use of alginate lyase for the treatment of bacterial infection in the lungs of CF patients still remains one of the most important goals. In the future, alginate lyases can be used for the production of biofuel from unusable seaweed materials like xylanases. Acknowledgement : This workwas supported by New & Renewable Energy R&D program under the Korea Ministry of Knowledge Economy (MKE). And also, students were supported by MKE and KOTEF through the Human Resource Training Project for Strategic Technology