Chitin biopolymer production and its by-product chitosan show great potential. These biomaterials have great applicability in various fields because they are non-toxic, biodegradable, biocompatible, and have antimicrobial effects. The most common source of chitin and chitosan is the crustaceous shell; however, mushrooms are an alternative source for isolating these biopolymers because their cellular wall has a high content of chitin, which may be transformed into chitosan through a deacetylation reaction. The main objective of this research was to obtain chitosan through the deacetylation of chitin isolated from the Ganoderma lucidum basidiomycetes mushroom, which is obtained through biotechnological culture. The material characterization was performed using X-ray diffraction, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analysis, and an evaluation of cytotoxicity comparing the results obtained with results for commercial chitosan. Protocol results showed that chitosan obtained from this mushroom had a significant similitude with commercial chitosan, yet the one obtained using P2 protocol was the one that rendered the best results: including diffractogram peaks, characteristic infrared analysis bands, and an 80.29 % degree of deacetylation. Cytotoxicity in vitro testing showed that the material was non-toxic; furthermore, it rendered very promising information regarding the evaluation of future applications of this biomaterial in the field of biomedicine.

Banana is one of the most important edible crops in the world, however, it’s attacked by different pathogens, one of the most prominent of these is the fungus Mycosphaerella fijiensis, causal agent of Black Sigatoka. The environmental and economic issues related to the pesticides used for its control have encouraged the search for cleaner alternative biomolecules. Previous studies were made by the Biotechnology group from the Universidad de Antioquia searching for a biological alternative for the control of M. fijiensis; in these the antifungal capacity of the fungus Ganoderma lucidum was determined as an antagonist and then as a source of protein extracts with inhibitory activity in vitro and in greenhouse plants; these findings were the foundation of this work, which focuses in the study of the enzymatic capacity of the proteins present in the protein extracts, due to their potential ability to degrade different compounds, including polysaccharides, lipids, peptides and nucleic acids, constituents of essential parts of a living cell; therefore these extracts can act as possible antifungal agents. In this study, protein extracts of G. lucidum obtained from bioreactor cultures (BIOFLO 110 ®) were characterized in terms of their deoxyribonuclease, ribonuclease, protease, glucanase and chitinase enzymatic activities. The extracts were also fractionated and each fraction obtained was evaluated for its inhibitory capacity against the phytopathogen fungus M. fijiensis, and through mass spectrometry analysis the presence of different enzymes with antifungal potential was confirmed.