No abstract

-Collagenases are enzymes with various important industrial and biotechnological applications. To be economically feasible, collagenase production should have high yields and use an inexpensive medium. The aim of this work was to study the influence of substrate concentration, pH and orbital agitation speed on collagenase production by yeast (13II) isolated from bee pollen (Melípona spp.) using a 2 3 full factorial design. The experiments were performed in 250mL Erlenmeyer flasks containing 50mL of culture medium inoculated with 10 6 cells/mL and incubated for 72h at 28 °C. Substrate concentration and initial medium pH exerted significant positive main effects, while the orbital agitation speed exerted a negative effect on collagenase production. The most favorable production conditions were found to be with 1.25% of gelatin, pH 7.5 and 100 rpm, which led to a collagenase activity of 66.86U. These results show that the yeast was found to be able to produce a large amount of colagenase.