“…Metallo-collagenases, first discovered in tadpole tissue explants (Gross and Lapiere, 1962), are zinc-containing enzymes that also generally require calcium for their optimum activity and stability, and cleave the collagen helix at a specific locus under physiological conditions (Gawston and Murphy, 1981;Harris and Vater, 1982;Sellers and Murphy, 1981;Stricklin et al, 1977). These enzymes have been widely studied from various mammalian tissues (Harris and Vater, 1982;Sellers and Murphy, 1981) as well as from bacteria, such as Bacillus cereus (Makinen and Makinen, 1987), Clostridium histolyticum (Bond and Van Wart, 1984a, b;Peterkofsky, 1982), Achromobacter (Nguyen et al, 1988), Vibrio alginolyticus (Takeuchi et al, 1992) and Clostridium perfringens (Matsuhita et al, 1994), and snake venom (Bjarnason and Fox, 1994). These metallo-collagenases, extracellular enzymes, are involved in remodeling the extracellular matrix.…”