Biodegradation of Chitin Extracted from Labeo catla Fish Scales and Production of Chitooligosaccharides by Novel Chitinolytic Bacteria Streptomyces chilikensis RC1830

ABSTRACT

Chitin, next to cellulose, is by far the most common biopolymer found in nature which is relatively resistant to degradation. Chitinolytic microorganisms can break glycosidic bonds in chitin to oligomers (chitooligosaccharides) and /or monomers (N-acetyl glucosamine) with various bioactivities. Utilization of the fish scales as a source of chitin followed by the production of commercially employable value-added products such as N-acetyl-D-glucosamine (NAG) and other chitooligosaccharides (COS) by using chitinolytic microorganism can be one method to overcome the environmental pollution problem and thus can be considered as a waste to wealth approach. In this present work, chitin was extracted from Labeo catla fish scale wastes by chemical treatment and was characterized using FT-IR, XRD, SEM-EDX, and solid-state ¹³C CP/MAS NMR. The yield of chitin was found to be as high as 12.6% having good structural and physiochemical properties The extracted chitin was converted to more useful COS by using a novel chitinolytic microorganism Streptomyces chilikensis RC1830.

KEYWORDS:

• Chitin
• chitooligosaccharide
• Streptomyces chilikensis
• fish scales
• microbial degradation
• characterization

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to BioCAre, the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), and Govt of India. The authors are also thankful to Dr. S. K. Dash for his valuable assistance for SEM and FTIR at Central Instrument Facility, Dept. of Microbiology, ICAR-OUAT, Bhubaneswar. The authors are also thankful to the X-ray diffraction facility of TIFR, Mumbai, IMMT Bhubaneswar, and NMR research facility, IISc, Bangalore, for their valuable assistance. The authors highly acknowledge Ms. Chinmayee Nanda for her proficiency in the English language and her assistance in the language correction of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.