• Applied Chemistry for Engineering
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.50-56
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• 2017

Formaldehyde is one of the toxic substances without any color and smell. Several methods to remove formaldehyde has been investigated up to now. Here, both the enzymatic and chemisorptive/catalytic liquid phase formaldehyde removal were investigated, and their catalytic activities in terms of specific activities were compared. Firstly, formaldehyde dehydrogenase (FDH) enzyme from Escherichia coli K12 was cloned, and expressed in Escherichia coli BL21(DE3). And the catalytic activity was characterized as $2.49{\times}10^3sec^{-1}mM^{-1}$ of $k_{cat}/K_m$ with 8.69 U/mg of the specific activity. Secondly, the chemisorptive and oxidative catalytic removals were investigated simultaneously. Activated carbons and zeolites treated with heat, KI, and KOH were used as chemisorption medium. And $Pd/TiO_2$ was used as an oxidative catalyst for the formaldehyde removal. All of the tested chemicals showed similar formaldehyde removal efficiencies of around 50%. However, the specific activity of FDH dependent formaldehyde removal was absolutely higher than that of using chemisorptive and catalytic removal processes with the ranges of 0.01 to 0.26 U/g.

• Microbiology and Biotechnology Letters
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.216-220
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• 2006

Thermophillic fungus Thermoascus aurantiacus showed excellent growth and produced high amount of alcohol oxidase and catalase in a pectin medium. Besides, the strain produced enzymes which related with pectin or alcohol decomposition. We detected extracellular pectin esterase (EC 3.1.1.11) activity and, both intracellular and extracellular pectinase (EC 4.2.2.10) activity, as pectinolytic enzymes produced by T. aurantiacus. The production of methanol decomposition enzymes, such as alcohol oxidase (AOD, EC 1.1.3.13), alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH, EC 1.1.1.1), formaldehyde dehydrogenase (FADH, EC 1.2.1.1) and formate dehydrogenase (FDH, EC 1.2.1.2) follows by pectin esterase reaction which is converted to methanol. We concluded that T. aurantiacus has pectinolytic and alcohol - oxidative enzymological mechanism which produced carbon dioxide as a final material, started from pectin.