Chitin is an insoluble component in the shells of several molluscan species. It is thought to play important roles, in biomineralization and shell structure. To date, however, reports are scarce and sometimes contradictory, and suffer from methodological problems. Only in a single cephalopod species has the chitin been identified as beta-chitin. We present data on chitin occurrence in 22 specie...

The animal immune response to chitin is not well understood and needs to be investigated further. However, this is a challenging topic to study because of the technical difficulties in purifying chitin, and because this material usually comes associated with contaminating components that can activate the immune system. In this study, improvements to previously described purification protocols w...

Cell-free extracts of ikfucor rouxii contain enzymes which synthesize uridine diphosphate &lcetyl-D-glucosamine from IV-acetyl-n-glucosamine. Procedures are described to prepare radiolabeled UDP-GlcNAc using cell-free extracts or living cells of this fungus. This sugar nucleotide serves as the precursor for chitin synthesis. Free N-acetyl-n-glucosamine is a strong activator of chitin synthesis....

A water-insoluble chitin-glucan complex, isolated from the mycelium of Aspergillus niger, was swollen in various aqueous media and treated subsequently by high-energy sonication. The concentration of the resulting water-soluble polysaccharide fractions was dependent on the swelling medium, the amount of the chitin-glucan complex in the suspension, and on the time of sonication. The yields of wa...

Chitosan is a deacetylated product of chitin produced by chitin deacetylase, an enzyme that hydrolyses acetamido groups of N-acetylglucosamine in chitin. Chitosan is a natural polymer that has great potential in biotechnology and in the biomedical and pharmaceutical industries. Commercially, it is produced from chitin via a harsh thermochemical process that shares most of the disadvantages of a...

Vibrio cholerae is naturally competent when grown on chitin. It is known that expression of the major regulator of competence, TfoX, is controlled by chitin; however, the molecular mechanisms underlying this requirement for chitin have remained unclear. In the present study, we identify and characterize a membrane-bound transcriptional regulator that positively regulates the small RNA (sRNA) Tf...

RADA16-I peptide hydrogel, a type of nanofiber scaffold derived from self-assembling peptide RADA16-I, has been extensively applied to regenerative medicine and tissue repair in order to develop novel nanomedicine systems. In this study, using RADA16-I peptide hydrogel, a three-dimensional (3D) cell culture model was fabricated for in vitro culture of three ovarian cancer cell lines. Firstly, t...

A chitinase has been obtained in milligram amounts from wheat germ by affinity chromatography on chitin followed by chromatography on Sephadex G-50. The purified enzyme was free from wheat germ agglutinin and showed a single peak on sodium dodecyl sulfateacrylamide gel electrophoresis. Isoelectric focussing on acrylamide gel slabs gave rise, however, to several bands, with isoelectric points ra...

A chitin binding protein (CBP21) 21 kDa in size, is a major protein in the culture supernatant when Serratia marcescens 2170 is grown in the presence of chitin. The gene (cbp) for CBP21 was found to be located in a region 1.5 kb downstream of the chiB gene encoding chitinase B. The cbp gene encodes a polypeptide of 197 amino acids with a calculated size of 21.6 kDa containing a putative signal ...

The architecture of the outer body wall cuticle is fundamental to protect arthropods against invading pathogens and numerous other harmful stresses. Such robust cuticles are formed by parallel running chitin microfibrils. Molting and also local wounding leads to dynamic assembly and disassembly of the chitin-matrix throughout development. However, the underlying molecular mechanisms that organi...