Chitin production by biological methods using mushrooms

Chitin is one of the most abundant biopolymers in the nature that can be extracted from insects, exoskleton of marine crustaceans and cell wall of some fungi. Chitin and its derivatives have applications in the many fields such as medical, food-beverages, agriculture and cosmetics. Eventhough, the most using global raw material of chitin manufacturing process is marine crustaceans, this situation leads to various disadvantages. Recent studies have shown that chitin from animal sources can influence negatively especially on people who is allergic to marine based foods. Thus, many studies have been performed for new alternative chitin sources and chitin extraction methods. The reasons for the high production cost of chitin extraction from marine crustecaen have been brought up the extraction of chitin from mushroom which is one of the potential new sources for chitin. In this study, the chitin extraction from the cell wall of Agaricus bisporus (cultivated mushroom) which is widely cultivated in the our country and in the world, has been performed using chemical, microbial and enzymatic methods. Deproteinization, which is the most important step of the extraction of chitin, has been carried out chemically using NaOH, microbial using bacteria Bacillus sp. and enzimatically using a protease named "Savinase 16L". The results of deproteinization obtained from the biological method which is the main aim of study, have been compared to those of chemical method. The percentage of chitin yield are found as 76% for chemical deproteinization, 62% for microbial deproteinization and 60% for enzymatic deproteinization. The amount of chitin was determined using a colorimetric method based on spectrophotometric measurements and the highest chitin yield was determined to be 29%. According to these results obtained in this present study, biological methods and mushrooms could be new alternatives for chitin extraction.