An insight into agricultural properties of actinomycetes

Abstract

Actinomycetes have long been exploited and studied for their antimicrobial properties. These are organisms that inhabit soil and provide peculiar earthy smell to the soil. In the present study attempts were made to isolate actinomycetes from various soil samples collected from forest as well as crop soils. The isolated actinomycetes were further inoculated on Pikovskaya’s agar media and on Carboxy Methyl Cellulose agar media to study their phosphate solubilizing and cellulolytic activity. These properties are desired to exploit the organism for agricultural purpose. Phosphate solubilizers supply the demand of soluble phosphate to the crop thereby increasing productivity and cellulolytic properties can help use these organisms to degrade organic cellulose, from agricultural waste, into simple sugars and make it available to plant for nutrition. We were able to obtain 17 different species of actinomycetes which were cellulolytic and/ or phosphate solubilizers. The results obtained are promising and these organisms can be utilized as soil inoculants to improve the quality of our crop soils. An observation was also made during isolation of actinomycetes that these organisms were readily isolated from forest soils but were very limited in crop soils. This suggests that the vigorous use of chemicals has adversely affected the microbiological quality of soil.