Rapid and Efficient Lysis of Yeast Cells…

Amsbio announce Zymolyase - a proprietary lytic enzyme mixture that offers superior and broad based biological activity across several genera of fungi including yeast. Purified from culture fluid of Arthrobacter luteus, Zymolyase offers strong lytic activity against living yeast cell walls to produce protoplast or spheroplast of various strains of yeast cells. Zymolyase has been demonstrated to be a more effective reagent for yeast cell wall degradation for protoplast formation compared to Lyticase and Glusulase.

The high activity of Zymolyase is attributed to its composition, as it is a mixture of lytic enzymes as opposed to a purified enzyme. Zymolyase contains four enzymes each of which attack a different cell wall polymer. Generally, the yeast cell wall consists of four major components, namely branched beta 1->3 glucans, substituted beta 1->3 glucans, glycoproteins, and mannans. Zymolyase includes enzymes which act on each of these polymers.

The principle enzyme is beta-1, 3 glucan laminaripentaohydrolase which fragments cell wall glucans into pentamers. The second key enzyme is beta-1, 3 glucanase which hydrolyses glucans to glucose, thus further degrading the cell wall. Present in lesser amounts are protease and mannose which act on glycoproteins and mannans, respectively. The combined action of these four enzymes facilitates unmatched protoplast formation efficiency by the Zymolyase mixture.

Increasing numbers of researchers using yeast to study biological systems (especially genetics), employing yeast 2 hybrid techniques and using yeast as an expression system for growth factors and therapeutics are turning to Zymolyase as their lytic enzyme reagent of choice. Amsbio offers two preparations of Zymolyase, Zymolyase-20T and -100T, having lytic activity of 20,000 units/gram and 100,000 units/gram respectively.