Concomitant production of detergent compatible enzymes by Bacillus flexus XJU-1

A soil screened Bacillus flexus XJU-1 was induced to simultaneously produce alkaline amylase, alka-line lipase and alkaline protease at their optimum levels on a common medium under submerged fer-mentation. The basal cultivation medium consisted of 0.5 % casein, 0.5 % starch and 0.5% cottonseedoil as an inducer forprotease, amylase, and lipase, respectively. The casein also served as nitrogen source for all 3 enzymes. The starch was also found to act as carbon source additive for both lipase and protease. Maximum enzyme production occurred on fermentation medium with 1.5 % ca-sein, 1.5 % soluble starch, 2 % cottonseed oil, 2 % inoculum size, initial pH of 11.0, incubation temper-ature of 37 °C and 1 % soybean meal as a nitrogen source supplement. The analysis of time course study showed that 24 h was optimum incubation time for amylase whereas 48 h was the best time for both lipase and protease. After optimization, a 3.36-, 18.64-, and 27.33-fold increase in protease, am-ylase and lipase, respectively was recorded. The lipase was produced in higher amounts (37.72 U/mL) than amylase and protease about 1.27 and 5.85 times, respectively. As the 3 enzymes are used in detergent formulations, the bacterium can be commercially exploited to secrete the alkaline en-zymes for use in detergent industry. This is the first report for concomitant production of 3 alkaline enzymes by a bacterium