Studies on Isolation and Characterization of Antibiotic Producing Microorganisms from Industrial Waste Soil Sample

Abstract

Antibiotics are one of the most important commercially exploited secondary metabolites produced by the bacteria and employed in a wide range. Most of the antibiotic producers used today are the soil microbes. Fungal strains and streptomyces members are extensively used in industrial antibiotic production. Bacteria are easy to isolate, culture, maintain and to improve their strains. Microbes are omni present and exist in a competitive environment. Bacillus species being the predominant soil bacteria because of their resistant endospore formation and production of vital antibiotics like bacitracin etc. are always found inhibiting the growth of the other organisms. In the present paper a soil bacterium with the antibiotic activity was screened and studied for morphological characters probably providing valuable information about the strain. The inhibitory activity of the organism was checked against some of the important opportunistic microbial flora and inoculated into an appropriate designed media depending on the bacterial requirements, and incubated for 48 hrs at 37 0 C. The produced compound was extracted by solvent extraction and assayed for its activity. Enhancement in the antibiotic production was studied under various parameters like temperature, pH, carbon source concentration, and sodium nitrate concentration, probably helping in the industrial production. The extracted substance was found effective against the gram positive endospore forming bacilli and gram positive cocci. Though a large list of antibiotics are known to be commercially available, the search for the most potential one is still on, and this work may provide some potential information on the antibiotic production and the control of microbial strains.