Review

Microbial production of raw starch digesting enzymes

Haiyan Sun¹, Xiangyang Ge², Lu Wang³, Pingjuan Zhao¹ and Ming Peng¹*

¹Key Laboratory of Tropical Crop Biotechnology, Ministry of Agriculture, Institute of Tropical Bioscience and Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences, Haikou 571101, China.

²The Key Laboratory of Industrial Biotechnology, Ministry of Education, School of Biotechnology, Jiangnan University, China.

³Wuxi Scientific Research and Designing institute of the State Administration of Grain Reserve, Wuxi, China.

*Corresponding author. E-mail: hysun168@126.com, mmpeng_2000@yahoo.cn.  Tel: +86-898-66963161. Fax: +86-898-66890978

Accepted 23 October, 2008

Raw starch digesting enzymes refer to enzymes that can act directly on raw starch granules below the gelatinization temperature of starch. With the view of energy-saving, a worldwide interest has been focused on raw starch digesting enzymes in recent years, especially since the oil crisis of 1973. Raw starch digesting enzymes are ubiquitous and produced by plants, animals and microorganisms. However, microbial sources are the most preferred one for large-scale production. During the past few years, the production of raw starch digesting enzymes by various microorganisms has been studied extensively. This paper reviews the recent development in the microbial production of raw starch digesting enzymes with a biotechnological perspective. This is the first review on microbial raw starch digesting enzymes till date.

Key words: Microbial, raw starch digesting enzymes, production.