Isolation of Invertase from Commercial and Local Honey

Presenter: Marilyn Nguyen

Co-Presenter(s):
Dong (DJ) Yi, Christian Gehres

Presenter Status: Undergraduate student

Academic Year: 20-21

Semester: Spring

Faculty Mentor: Monica Lares

Department: Chemistry

Screenshot URL: https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1cs9g5QDlPGzItubcer9KN_cdOR27RpCX

Abstract:
Invertase is a highly useful enzyme found in a wide variety of microbial organisms and serves in the hydrolysis process of cleaving sucrose into its invert sugars of fructose and glucose.  For the intent of our lab, we wished to derive the same invertase enzyme but from a source different than that of yeast or fungi.   Honeybees are one of the few organisms larger than microbes that can produce its own invertase so in our case, we wanted to study the presence of invertase within honey.  Several steps were taken in the purification process which included dialysis of the honey samples, salting out with ammonium sulfate, and the centrifugation of the resulting mixture. From there, gel filtration was utilized to further purify the product and exclude unnecessary molecules.  Several assays were performed to better understand the kinetics behind the enzyme’s reactivity.  By finding the catalytic activity we can determine what honey brand (Kirkland Norcal Honey or Sonoma County Bee Company)  has a greater concentration of invertase. That could lead to higher quality invertase and thus higher quality of honey.