Purification, characterization, gene cloning, and heterologous expression in Escherichia coli of a thermostable beta-1,3-1,4-glucanase from Bacillus altitudinis YC-9 have been investigated in this paper. The donor strain B. altitudinis YC-9 was isolated from spring silt. The native enzyme was purified by ammonium sulfate precipitation, diethylaminoethyl-cellulose anion exchange chromatography, and Sephadex G-100 gel filtration. The purified beta-1,3-1,4-glucanase was observed to be stable at 60 A degrees C and retain more than 90 % activity when incubated for 2 h at 60 A degrees C and remain about 75 % and 44 % activity after incubating at 70 A degrees C and 80 A degrees C for 10 min, respectively. Acidity and temperature optimal for this enzyme was pH 6 and 65 A degrees C. The open reading frame of the enzyme gene was measured to be 732 bp encoding 243 amino acids, with a predicted molecular weight of 27.47 kDa. The gene sequence of beta-1,3-1,4-glucanase showed a homology of 98 % with that of Bacillus licheniformis. After being expressed in E. coli BL21, active recombinant enzyme was detected both in the supernatants of the culture and the cell lysate, with the activity of 102.7 and 216.7 U/mL, respectively. The supernatants of the culture were used to purify the recombinant enzyme. The purified recombinant enzyme was characterized to show almost the same properties to the wild enzyme, except that the specific activity of the recombinant enzyme reached 5392.7 U/mg, which was higher than those ever reported beta-1,3-1,4-glucanase from Bacillus strains. The thermal stability and high activity make this enzyme broad prospect for industry application. This is the first report on beta-1,3-1,4-glucanase produced by B. altitudinis.