Abstract :

Looking at the high application potential of dextrans in food, pharmaceutical and tissue engineering fields, a dextran producing strain of lactic acid bacterium was isolated from the sugarcane field soil sample from Assam, falling under north-east Indian microbial diversity. The full-length 16S rRNA gene of the isolate was amplified by Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) and sequenced by Sanger’s method. The sequence was aligned with the reference sequences in the GenBank of National Centre for Biotechnological Information (NCBI) and Ribosomal Database Project (RDP) using BLAST programme. Distance matrix based phylogenetic analysis resulted in well-resolved trees with nodes supported with high bootstrap pseudoreplicate scores. The lactic acid bacterium isolate was identified as Pediococcus pentosaceus (GenBank Accession Number EU569832). This identification revealed the dextran production attribute of Pediococcus genus of lactic acid bacteria for the first time ever, heralding further rigorous investigation on this aspect. This investigation also unravelled the abundance of industrially valuable microbial flora in the soil of north-east India.