Evolution of endoglucanase activity in olives during ripening and storage and its relationship with cellulolytic microorganisms

Changes in Texture and Cell Wall Polysaccharides of Olive Fruit during "Spanish Green Olive" Processing

“…Fermentation, on the other hand, produced a marked solubilization and/or interchange of a wide range of polysaccharides including glucans, arabinoxylans, xyloglucans, arabinans, and galactoglucomannans. In olive fruits, -galactosidase, /3-galactosidase, a-mannosidase, -arabinosidase, -xylosidase (Heredia et al, 1992(Heredia et al, , 1993, endoglucanases (Heredia et al, 1991;Fernández-Bolaños et al, 1992) polygalacturonase, and pectinmethylesterase (Mínguez et al, 1978) have been described. A significant proportion of these activities is probably lost during lye treatment; however, if some of them remain, those in the pulp will find a modified cell wall with increased accessibility due to the modifications of the pectic polysaccharides that take place during this treatment.…”

“…After fermentation the firmness decreased, showing that the activities of endogenous and/or exogenous enzymes may play an important role in fruit softening (Fernández-Bolaños et al, 1992; Meurer and Gierschner, 1992; Heredia et al, 1993). In this case, the variations in cell wall composition were the same in both seasons studied (Table 1), neutral sugars and cellulose decreasing and there being no very marked changes in polysaccharide solubility (Figure 1), except for HB and CEL: firmness seems to be related in this step with the hemicellulosic and -cellulose fractions.…”

Olive Fruit Cell Wall: Degradation of Cellulosic and Hemicellulosic Polysaccharides during Ripening

“…The study of olive fruit ripening is of great interest in Spain because the ripening stage of the fruit influences the processing and industrial production of olive oil as well as the production of pickled olives. In this paper, research has focused on hemicellulose and cellulose modifications during ripening, in addition to establishing the relationship between polysaccharide changes that take place in the cell wall of the olive with that of enzyme activity responsible for cell wall degradation reported in previous papers ( − ).…”