Abstract:
Invert sugar, a mixture of glucose and fructose, is favored for its higher sweetness than sucrose, greater resistance to crystallization and higher solubility, which is therefore widely used in the food industry.
β-D-fructofuranosidase exists widely in nature and has attracted much attention and shows promise in the production of invert sugar with a variety of industrial applications. To obtain a new
β-D-fructofuranosidase resource and explore its enzymatic properties and potential applications in sugar conversion, the
β-D-fructofuranosidase gene
BtFFase8 originating from
Bacillus tropicus was mined, successfully synthesized and expressed in
Escherichia coli. The gene sequences containing the gene encoding
β-D-fructofuranosidase were screened from NCBI GenBank search and Blast sequence comparison. The
BtFFase8 gene was analyzed and homology matched using bioinformatics tools to predict the theoretical molecular mass and isoelectric point of the protein. Sequences of genes containing
β-D-fructofuranosidase were found and compared by database, and were cloned into vectors pET-28a(+). The obtained recombinant plasmid was transformed into
E. coli BL21 to construct the recombinant strain
E. coli BL21/pET28a-BtFFase8. Cloned enzymes BtFFase8 were purified by Ni-IDA with one-step affinity chromatography. The molecular weight size of BtFFase8 proteins was analyzed by SDS-PAGE, enzyme activity was determined by the ability of the enzyme hydrolysis products to be detected by the glucose kit, and the protein content was determined by the forintol reagent assay. Through bioinformatics and molecular biology techniques, this study successfully discovered a
β-D-fructofuranosidase gene named
BtFFase8. The
BtFFase8 gene encodes 491 amino acids and one stop codon, and the encoded protein possesses a theoretical molecular mass of 57.1 kDa and inferred
pI of 5.56, with a signal peptide and two N-glycosylation sites. Cloned enzyme BtFFase8 was purified in one step and showed a single band in SDS-PAGE with a molecular weight of 57.0 kDa, and with a specific enzyme activity of 13.4 U/mg against the sucrose substrate. The optimal pH and temperature of BtFFase8 were pH 6.5 and 45 ℃, respectively. It was stable at temperatures up to 40 ℃ and within pH range of 5.0-8.0, and the residual enzyme activity can be retained by more than 80%. In addition, BtFFase8 demonstrated resistance to various common proteases, such as alkaline proteases, acidic proteases and trypsin, more than 70% enzyme activity. The discovery of BtFFase8 and the cloning of the enzyme with excellent enzymatic properties will provide a solid theoretical foundation for its future applications in food processing, particularly in sugar conversion for production.