beta-galactosidase activity

traitmech:000148 · CLASS · PROPOSED

A physiological enzyme-activity phenotype in which a cell produces active beta-galactosidase enzymes that hydrolyze lactose into glucose and galactose.

Trait evidence (2)

DOI:10.3389/fmicb.2021.742300
β-Galactosidase (EC 3.2.1.23), also referred to as lactase, is an important member of glycosyl hydrolase, which can hydrolyze O-glycosidic bonds of lactose by hydrolysis reaction, resulting in the production of glucose and galactose

Zhou et al. define beta-galactosidase as EC 3.2.1.23, a lactose-hydrolyzing glycosyl hydrolase that produces glucose and galactose, grounding the enzyme activity named by the organism-level phenotype.
DOI:10.1128/jcm.22.3.333-335.1985
Selenomonas sputigena was positive for α-galactosidase, β-galactosidase, and α-glucosidase (API ZYM strip) and for α-glucosidase, β-glucosidase, and α-galactosidase (API An-Ident strip).

Tanner et al. detected beta-galactosidase in Selenomonas sputigena with the API ZYM enzyme activity panel.

Provenance

Identifier source: TraitMech local identifier
Definition source: DOI:10.3389/fmicb.2021.742300

Parent traits (1)

phenotype METPO:1000059

kg-microbe context

No kg-microbe node embedding matched this record in the 2026-04-25 deepwalk.

Canonical examples (1)

Organisms cited as exemplars of this trait. Taxon ids are NCBITaxon and link out to the NCBI record.

Selenomonas sputigena NCBITaxon:69823 DOI:10.1128/jcm.22.3.333-335.1985 Tanner et al. reported Selenomonas sputigena as positive for beta-galactosidase in the API ZYM enzyme activity panel.

Discussions and Knowledge Gaps (1)

Open questions attached to this trait. Seeded by just knowledge-gap-scan and curated; see the corpus-wide index.

Resolve an exact external ontology class for beta-galactosidase activity before adding a TraitRecord xref.

CURATION TODO OPEN beta-galactosidase-activity-xref-gap · raised by codex · 2026-09-11

Not yet attached to a section of this record — a curator sets attaches_to (e.g. causal_graphs#some_edge) so the gap shows beside the mechanism it concerns.

GO:0004565 carries the same beta-galactosidase activity label but denotes the enzyme molecular function rather than the organism-level beta-galactosidase production phenotype, so it is appropriate as a causal-node grounding rather than an equivalent TraitRecord xref.

Curation history

2026-09-11T19:47:00Z · MINTED_TRAITMECH_ID · codex
Minted beta-galactosidase activity as a DOI-backed TraitRecord after a repository-wide duplicate review covering ignored and hidden files; METPO has no exact beta-galactosidase activity class yet.