Effect of Extracted Egyptian Keratinase on the Properties of Native Coarse Wool

This work aims to study an economy approach to improve physical and chemical properties of native coarse wool fibre such as felt proofing, dyeability, and degree of whiteness & yellowness by using keratinase enzyme which is derived from extremophilic microorganism. It is isolated locally from leather wastes at Egyptian tanneries and identified phylogenetically as Cyberlindnera fabianii NRC3 aza. Pretreatment of wool fibre enhances the anti-felting properties as well as the dye exhaustion (%) as compared with the untreated one. These increases depend on many factors for enzyme such as: pH, concentrations, treatment time and temperature. Washing fastness of the pretreated dyed wool fibers with reactive dye was performed. The change of the chemical composition for the pretreatment wool fiber was investigated by using alkali solubility test and elemental analysis. Scanning electron microscopy was performed to investigate the morphological changes on the surface of the enzyme treated wool fibres.