Abstract
Commercial preparation of hen egg-white lysozyme was used in this study. The lysozyme hydrolyzates of chitin with low degrees of polymerization (DP) from 1 to 6 were analyzed by HPLC. The natural logarithm of the retention time of N-acetylchitooligosaccharides (NACOs) correlated linearly with the DP values. It was found that the optimum temperature and reaction time for NACOs were 37°C and one hour. Longer reaction time leads to the generation of NACOs with lower DP. The NACOs were examined for their inhibitory effects on human leukemia cell lines. K562 cells were treated with these NACOs for one, two, and three days. The results showed these NACOs had the effects of growth inhibition and morphological changing.
