Strain improvement of Trichoderma afroharzianum through induced gamma radiation mutation for cellulase and xylanase production enhancement

Cellulases and xylanases are hydrolytic enzymes that randomly cleave the β-1, 4 backbones of the cellulose and arabinoxylans of wheat flour and are widely used in the bakery industry as a dough texture improver in the formulations of flour products. Creating novel sources of a microbial strain using induced gamma irradiation can increase enzyme production for bakery industrial usage. According to this, Co60 gamma irradiation has been used to develop a mutant strain of Trichoderma afroharzianum. Trichoderma mutants were isolated, and the qualitative and quantitative screening were used to evaluate the extracellular enzyme production with the wheat bran waste as a substrate. The best Trichoderma mutant isolate was identified using the DNA barcoding method. The highest xylanase activities were observed in the superior mutant isolate of Trichoderma afroharzianum NAS107-M82, which is approximately 3.3 times higher than its parent strain. The electrophoretic pattern of proteins showed that the exo-glucanase I, endo-glucanase III, and the xylanase I enzymes hydrolyzed the wheat bran, synergistically. Overall, gamma irradiation-induced mutation could be an expedient technique to access such superior mutants for the bioconversion of wheat bran wastes to xylanase enzyme.