Investigation of effects of protease enzyme produced by Bacillus subtilis 168 E6-5 and commercial enzyme on physical properties of woolen fabric

Abstract

Wool is one of the most important fibers in textile industry, and has been commonly used for producing value added products due to its properties of lightness, warmth, softness, and smoothness. However, the special scale structure in wool cuticle can cause felting shrinkage of wool fabrics. Proteases have been widely used to modify the surface of wool to prevent wool felting, due to their ability to catalyze the hydrolysis of peptide bonds in wool scales. Although the treatment of wool with proteases was considered as an environmentally friendly technique to provide wool fabrics with shrink resistance properties, proteases exhibited low efficacy in removing the cuticle scales because of the highly cross-linked barriers. In this study, wool fabric was treated with protease enzyme obtained from novel isolated bacteria and commercial protease enzyme, and the results were compared. The tear strength, pilling changes in ΔE values, whiteness and yellowness values of wool were controlled. Results showed that treatment with Bacillus subtilis 168 E6-5 protease enzyme yielded improvements in the physical properties of wool fabric compared with commercial enzyme.