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can urease enzyme be added to urine to speed up the hydrolysis of urea in urine?

I started collecting my urine yesterday to age into ammonia. Did some research on the microbe that does the hydrolysis of urea and found the urease enzyme is the predominate enzyme. Found urease enzyme is commercially made from Jack Bean meal extract and can be purchased from Worthington Biochemical Corp, but it has be shipped in ice pack to preserve it. Also found urease enzyme can be extracted fresh from soya beans. See the bottom of this very informative article on urease enzyme at Science in Schools

I use to make soy milk from soybeans and now I know why the raw soy milk must be heated to 140F for 20 mins. This deactivates the urease enzyme and is done in all commercially made soy foods. In making home made soy milk I found a short cut for soaking the soybeans to make a puree in a blender. I do my own fresh milled flour and soybean flour is the same as the soybean puree. Very easy to mill soybeans into flour and make soy milk, it tastes as good or better than store bought! I'd be happy to share my recipe with anyone interested.

Ok, so the question is.... can the urease enzyme speed up making ammonia from urine? Well of course I'll have to mill some soybeans and add to a sample of my urine to see what happens. If anyone has any info on this please share.

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Permalink Reply by Vlad Jovanovic on January 24, 2015 at 7:45am

You don't have to go through any of that trouble...simply add some aged humonia (10-20%) to the fresh urine. That's all you need to do. Within a few days time, the fresh stuff will have hydrolysed.

You can also raise the pH of the fresh stuff to over 9 and it with result in the same thing...

Potassium hydroxide seemed to work best for this. You can either purchase potassium hydroxide (KOH), or simply make it yourself with ashes and rainwater. It's really simple to make. Before I came to the States last year, used to heat my house with wood, so I always had lots of ashes around from hardwood trees...just don't use anything that's galvanized, (like a bucket) or made from aluminum...and your good.

Now that I'm on the natural gas, I had to resort to buying a case of KOH flakes...

http://www.artfire.com/ext/shop/product_view/essentialdepot/3416092...

Permalink Reply by Gene Parbst on January 24, 2015 at 10:59am

That's great info Vlad, thanks for helping beginners like me. I'm making my first batch of humonia, so when that's finished I'll use some of that to speed up the following batches. I have leftover KOH flakes from when I tried doing HOH to increase gas mileage like 10 years ago, so that's handy! I burn wood for heating and have lots of wood ashes. I throw some of them in the compost to boost the potassium.