Original Articles
Paratpar Sarkar, R. N. Singh a
Abstract
The State of Uttarakhand has about 64.79% forest cover, 14.02% under crop cultivation and remaining 21.19% is populated. With limited land under cultivation major focus is on increasing yield and sustaining it for long time. Bacteria residing in the soils, including phosphatase producing bacteria, have potential to improve crop yield and sustaining it as they make phosphates available to plants. We have focused our efforts on isolating bacteria which are high phosphatase producers and standardized optimum media and other conditions for their growth. We isolated fourteen isolates that showed high alkaline phosphatase activity. Isolate ALKP 12 demonstrated highest alkaline phosphatase activity of 600 unit/ml in media 2 (basal media). This isolate was used for further studies. Under optimized conditions of pH 9 and 37°C, alkaline phosphatase activity of this isolate could be induced to very high level using media 1 (fermentation media), ranging from 1706 unit/ml and 1900 unit/ml. Another unique feature of this isolate is that it shows surprisingly high and unusual phosphatase activity of 1002 unit/ml even at pH 4. As this isolate can utilize cost effective molasses and it can even work in both acidic as well as basic soil, it holds potential to improve growth of the plant, increase yield and sustaining it.