MOLECULAR IDENTIFICATION OF PSYCHROTROPIC BACTERIA FROM ANTARCTIC SOIL

Abstract

Antarctic environment is one of the most fragile ecological systems on the earth planet.
Literature indicated that a large number of reviews on diversity of microbes in cold environments
often begin with a lamentation on the inadequate information about organisms that leave in cold
areas or their ways of adaptation to such environments. Our objective was to identify
psychrotrophic bacteria from Top cliff soil collected from Antarctica. Bacterium was isolated by
incubating the sample in Antarctic Bacterial Medium in the laboratory at 20oC for 48 hours.
Promega, USA DNA purification kit was used to extract the bacterial DNA. Universal
eubacterial primers 27F and 1492R were used to amplify the 16S rRNA gene of the bacteria. The
Amplified genes were sequenced and analysed using the basic local alignment search tool
(BLAST) to identify the bacterium with highest similarity and phylogenetic tree was contrusted
using clustalX. Results of the gel electrophoresis of the PCR product produced DNA fragment
bands of approximately 1500bp. The isolate share 97% similarity with the top match in the
GENBANK. Bacillus species were found having highest percentage similarity with the isolated
bacterium from Antarctic. The 16S rRNA partial gene sequence of the psychptrophic bacterium
isolated in this study was successfully deposited in GenBank nucleotide database by direct
submission and receive the KX000297 accession number.