Isolation and Characterization of a Chitin Degrading Marine Bacterium Belonging to the Genus Alteromonas.

A marine bacterium which produced an extracellular chitinase was isolated and identified. Out of 946 isolates from Aburatsubo Inlet, Sagami Bay and Otsuchi Bay, 95 were found to produce chitinases. We selected strain O-7 for further studies which was isolated from sediment sample at Sagami Bay at the depth of 5m, and showed a very high chitinase productivity. The strain O-7 was an aerobic, polarly flagellated, gram-negative, and rod-shaped organism with a low G+C contents (43.5mol%). The strain required seawater salts (0.8-7.0%) for the growth, indicating that this isolate is a marine strain. From the taxonomical characteristics, strain O-7 was identified as Alteromonas sp. Chitin was essential to produce chitinase as an inducer, and the optimum concentration of colloidal chitin for chitinase production was 0.5% (w/v).