Ramesh et al Int. J. Pure App. Biosci. 4 (1): 126-132 (2016) ISSN: 2320 – 7051 Copyright © February, 2016; IJPAB 126 Potential of Bacillus subtilis to produce acidic protease under mutagenic condition Prasanth M., Nitin Marathe, Shubham Jadhav, Saharika Slathia, Ramankannan A., Shanthini T. and Ramesh N.* School of Bio-Sciences and Technology, VIT University, Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India *Corresponding Author E-mail: drpnramesh@gmail.com Received: 13.01.2016 | Revised: 20.01.2016 | Accepted: 26.01.2016 INTRODUCTION Protease is an enzyme that chiefly involved in cleaving the long peptide chains into short fragments and is produced by various sources such as plants, animals, and microorganisms. Among these, microorganisms were noteworthy,since it can grow in a shorter period, produce a specialized enzyme, cheaper and reliable 1 . In culture medium, large amount of extra cellular proteases is produced by the bacteria which belong to genus Bacillus, they are largely present in the soil and mud regions 2, 3 . Marine microorganism producing protease has upraised magnetism by the reason of habituation to extreme conditions 4 . Protease enzyme finds application in various fields like meat tenderization, detergents, silver recovery, laundry, stone washing jeans, pulp and paper manufacture, leather de-hairing and tanning, de- sizing of textiles and de-inking of paper 5, 6 . Hence the yield of protease can be enhanced by exposing the strain to ultraviolet radiation and is universally practiced for inducing strain improvement 7 . Our present study mainly focused on to isolate protease producing strain and tooptimize the cultural condition such as temperature, pH, and fermentation period along with exposure of strains to ultraviolet radiation to investigate the increased protease activity. Available online at www.ijpab.com ISSN: 2320 – 7051 Int. J. Pure App. Biosci. 4 (1): 126-132 (2016) Research Article ABSTRACT Protease from Bacillus subtilis has wide applications in industrial sectors.A total of 28 bacteria were isolated from marine mud sample, of which 3 isolates exhibited constructive results for protease production in skim milk, gelatin and casein agar. Among three isolates, MMK 2/8 had superlative enzymatic activity in skim milk broth (170 U/mL) and was subjected for taxonomical identification, which was found to be Bacillus subtilis. The finest conditions were found to be at pH 6.0, temperature 40 o C and 1% NaCl concentration and their maximal enzyme activitywas 354 U/mL, 437 U/mL and 263U/mL respectively, at 36 hrs of incubation. The molecular weight of the protease enzyme was considered to be approximately 50 kDa by SDS-PAGE. The enzyme activity was enriched by exposing it to ultra violet radiation [UV] for 60 secand it was observed to be 610 U/mL. Hence, we charted that the production of acidic protease treated with ultra violet radiation was maximum when compared with the parental strain. Key words: Acidic protease, Bacillus subtilis, UV radiation, skim milk agar DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18782/2320-7051.2188 Cite this article: Prasanth, M., Marathe, N., Jadhav, S., Slathia, S., Ramankannan, A., Shanthini, T. and Ramesh, N., Potential of Bacillus subtilis to produce acidic protease under mutagenic condition, Int. J. Pure App. Biosci. 4(1): 126-132 (2016). doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.18782/2320-7051.2188