Vol. 8, Issue 2 (2019)

Author(s):
Purvi Shroff and Samir Parikh

Abstract:
Nowadays, all commercial alginates are extracted from brown seaweeds, and only two bacterial genera have been recorded to secrete alginate, Azotobacter, and Pseudomonas. In the present study, the bacterial strains Bacillus licheniformis PS01, Paenibacillus Riograndensis PS02, Pseudomonas fluorescence PS03 isolated from North Gujarat region from the rhizosphere of Triticum, Momordica charantia, and Nicotiana tabacum, respectively were used. All the bacterial strains were recognized to produce alginate biopolymer, hence to increase the alginate yield mutation study was carried out. The mutational study was done using physical parameter ultraviolet (UV) radiation (exposure at a 254nm wavelength for a different time interval) and chemical mutagens, Benzalkonium chloride (BKC) (50µl/ml to 500µl/ml) and Ninhydrin (0.1µg/ml to 10µg/ml). Characterization of the extracted alginate biopolymer from the wild-type strains was done by FE-SEM, FTIR, HPLC, and GPC. Results confirmed that the PS01-Nin1 gives the highest production of alginate 11.04 g.L^-1 at 0.1 µg/ml ninhydrin concentration, PS02-Nin2 (0.5 µg/ml) and PS02 both gave similar results (8.82 g.L^-1), and PS03-UV3 gave 10.66 g.L^-1 highest alginate concentration after the exposure of 3 min to UV radiation. Characterization confirmed the presence of alginate biopolymer with 2.3 x 10³kDa, 2.2 x 10³kDa and 2.2 x 10³kDa higher molecular weight from PS01, PS02, and PS03 strain respectively.