Economical Production and Optimization of Alkaline Protease from Bacillus Subtilis MTCC1790 by using Taguchi Design

Abstract

In recent years there has been a phenomenal increase in the use of alkaline proteases as industrial catalysts. These enzymes offer advantages over the use of conventional chemical catalysts for numerous reasons, for example they exhibit high catalytic activity, a high degree of substrate specificity, can be produced in large amounts and are economically viable. Bacterial alkaline proteases constitute an important group of industrial enzymes. The objective of the present study was to determine the significant parameters in the economical production and optimize the conditions for alkaline protease by Bacillus subtilis MTCC1790 in submerged fermentation by using Taguchi experimental design. This approach facilitated the study of interaction of a large number of variables spanned by factors and their settings with a small number of experimental runs leading to considerable economy in time and cost for the process optimization. There are Five factors viz., carbon, nitrogen, metal ions, inoculum% and agitation, each at two levels were selected and an orthogonal array layout of L16 (4)5 performed. The experiment result indicated that dextrose (0.6%), NH 4 Cl (0.6 %), Ca 2+ as metal ions, inoculum (8%) and agitation (100 rpm) were the important factors for alkaline protease production. At this optimum condition, the yield of protease production by Bacillus subtilis MTCC1790 was found to be 286 U/mL.