Process for producing theanine
Author: Takashi Tachiki and Yukitaka Okada and Makoto Ozeki and Tsutomu Okubo and Lekh Raj Juneja and Nagahiro Yamazaki
It is intended to provide a novel process for efficiently producing theanine, thereby enabling convenient and industrially advantageous production of theanine. Pseudomonas citronellosis GEA, which has been newly isolated from soil in nature and selected, is a theanine-producing strain belonging to the species citronellosis of the genus Pseudomonas and showing a Ϝ-glutamyl transfer reaction. Theanine can be highly efficiently produced, compared with the existing methods, by using glutaminase originating in the above strain in a mixture of glutamine with ethylamine at pH 9 to 12.