Distribution of Transaminases in Marine Algae

Investigations were carried out to detect transaminase activities in 23 species of seaweeds including green, brown and red algae, and its activities were demonstrated to be present in almost all the algae tested. Through the three algal groups, GOT was most active and GPT was the second, although their substrate specificities were not determined, i. e. it was not clear whether a single enzyme would be responsible for these activities or separate enzyme would be concerned with each activity.The rates of the forward and backward reactions of GPT were found to be almost equal in all enzyme sources. In general, the transaminase activities were highest in green algae among the three algal groups, and the next were in red algae. Their activities in brown algae were extremely low in the extracts obtained by the same procedure as with the green and red algae, but considerably high activities were obtained by the extraction procedure using polyvinylpyrrolidone. This fact suggests that phenolic compounds in brown algae may inhibit these transaminase activities.