Isolation of a Cellulolytic Bacterium from the Lonar Soda Lake and Genomic Analysis of it

Abstract

A bacterium isolated from Lonar Soda lake sample was tested for its cellulolytic activity, which was showing more activity on cellobiose as substrate than CMC and sugarcane bagasse. CMCase activity was highest at 72 h of incubation and declined on further increase in the time of incubation. Experiments were conducted to determine the effect of different carbon sources on CMCase production. Overall, the bacterium showed the highest CMCase activity; i.e., 0.45 IU mL-1 at 72 h, when cellobiose was used as a carbon source. Genomic sequencing of this strain B14 was performed which was showing an assembly length of 5.39 Mb. Gene ontology analysis assignied 3907, 3012 and 1003 genes associated with known molecular functions, biological processes and cellular components, respectively. The total protein coding genes present were 5477, amounting to 97.89% of the genome size. Of these, 4150 genes were protein coding genes with known functions and 1327 genes were protein coding genes with some unknown functions. The gene annotation using PANTHER identified 9 different sequences across all the contigs which belonged to Glycosyl hydrolase family13. Of these, only one gene was identified as a a-amylase, the remaining 8 genes are potentially novel genes belonging to the family present in the strain B14.

Keywords

• cellulolytic bacterium
• bacillus aryabhattai b14
• lonar soda lake