Soil Protease

Abstract

Proteases are widely distributed among soils and show a wide range of activities (Ladd and Butler 1972; Hayano 1986). Protease enzymes are involved in the initial hydrolysis of protein components of organic nitrogen to simple amino acids. Hydrolytic degradation of proteins is an important step in the nitrogen cycle. Proteases in soils hydrolyze not only added proteins but also native soil added proteins (Kiss et al. 1975). Protease enzymes, detected in microorganisms, plants, and animals, catalyze the hydrolysis of proteins to polypeptides and oligopeptides to amino acids (Handa et al. 2000) involved in the nitrogen cycle (Moreno et al. 2003). Treatment of soils with metal-contaminated sewage sludge (Achberger and Ohlinger 1988), effluents from cotton ginning mills (Narasimha 1997), and pig slurry (Plaza et al. 2002) increased protease activity. In contrast to this, decreased protease activity was observed in soils treated with herbicides (Pahwa and Bajaj 1999), insecticides (Omar and Abd-Alla 2000), organic matter (Ladd and Butler 1969), crude oils (Walker et al. 1975), and chlorothalonil (Singh et al. 2002).