Isolation of sucrose: sucrose 1-fructosyltransferase (1-SST) from barley (Hordeum vulgare)

The enzyme sucrose: sucrose 1-fructosyltransferase was partially purified from barley leaf growth zones. Four steps (ammonium sulphate precipitation and polyethylene glycol precipitation, followed by chromatography on Concanavalin A-sepharose and hydroxylapatite) yielded a 35-fold purification. The resulting preparation of 1-SST which still contained a number of different activities related to fructan metabolism, was subjected to preparative isoelectric focusing, and sections of the gel were analysed individually for 1-SST and related activities, using sucrose and 1-kestose as substrates. This procedure yielded a 196-fold purification and revealed the presence of two isozymes of 1-SST with pI values of 4.93 and 4.99, as determined by analytical isoelectric focusing of the corresponding fractions. Both isozymes produced glucose and 1-kestose when incubated with sucrose. In addition, small amounts of 6-kestose and tetrasaccharides were formed. In particular, one of the two 1-SST isozymes yielded fructose when incubated with 1-kestose, indicating that it also acts as a fructan exohydrolase. The other isozyme exhibited less fructan exohydrolase activity. Nystose was also degraded by the fructan exohydrolase activity but less than 1-kestose, whereas 6-kestose was not a substrate for the enzyme. Incubation of both 1-SSTs with different concentrations of sucrose showed that the enzyme was not saturated even at 500 mM. As for the barley sucrose: fructan 6-fructosyltransferase, both isozymes of 1-SST yielded two polypeptide bands of molecular weight 50 and 22 kDa upon sodium dodecylsulphate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, suggesting their close relationship to invertase (composed of two subunits of similar size), as previously reported for other plants.