Chitosan-glucan complex

Fungi have been used to produce a lot of valuable products such as enzymes, food products, organic acids, and medicines (Tables 1 and 2). Waste mycelia remain at the end of the fermentation processes and it has been proposed to transform them into valuable products such as chitosan and chitosan-glucan complex (Table 3). 

Importantly, cell wall matrix must be broken down far enough in order to study the linkage between the chitosan and glucan in the fungal cell wall and to extract total chitosan (i.e., free chitosan plus chitosan bounded to glucan). In 1994, Muzzarelli et al. reported that the chitosan-glucan complex can be split by 25% NaOH [46]. 

Nwe N, Stevens WF, Tokura S, Tamura H (2008) Characterization of chitin and chitosan-glucan complex extracted from cell wall of fungus Gongronella butleri USDB 0201 by enzymatic method. Enzyme Microbial Technol 42 242-251... 

Nwe N, Stevens WF, Tamura H (2007) Extraction of the chitosan-glucan complex and chitosan from fungal cell wall and their application in tissue engineering. In Abstracts of papers, 234th ACS national meeting, Boston, CARB-118... 

N. Nwe, W.E Stevens, Chitosan isolation from chitosan-glucan complex of fungal cell wall using amylolityc enzymes, Biotechnol. Lett., 24,1461-1464,2002. 

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