Asad Hussain Shah‡, Kazima Ishaq§, Anila Fariq§, Sajida Rasheed§, Sammyia Jannat§Corresponding author: Asad Shah ( asad.shah@manchester.ac.uk ) © Asad Shah, Kazima Ishaq, Anila Fariq, Sajida Rasheed, Sammyia Jannat. This is an open access preprint distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Citation:
Shah AH, Ishaq K, Fariq A, Rasheed S, Jannat S (2023) Diversity of culturable thermophilic bacteria in hotspring of Kotli Azad Jammu and Kashmir. ARPHA Preprints. https://doi.org/10.3897/arphapreprints.e100831 |  |
Hot water springs are unique areas populated by mesophiles, thermotolerant, and hyperthermophiles. They are source of diversity of thermophiles, mainly belonging to archaea and bacteria domains. The diversity of thermophiles gives an outline of the huge biological potential that can be exploited for industrial applications.To this end, this study was aimed to isolate and characterize the unexplored thermophilic microorganisms from hot water spring in Tatapani, Tehsil & District Kotli AJK, Pakistan. Around 10 bacterial isolates were identified using morphological, biochemical, physiological and molecular attributes. Sequencing of the 16S rDNA gene of the isolates followed by BLAST search revealed that the strain MBT008 has 100% similarity with Anoxybacillus kamchatkensis. MBT012 showed 99.57% similarity with A. mongoliensis, MBT014 was affiliated with A. tengchongensis with 99.43% similarity, MBT009 showed 99.83% homology with A. gonensis and MBT018, 98.70% similarity with A. karvacharensis. The presence of all this microbial divesrity in one common source is of immense importance related to envioronmental and industrial aspects in general and extraction of thermostable enzymes from these thermophiles specifically opens new horizons in the field of industrial biotechnology. These thermophiles are revealing new capabilities and are being manipulated by biotechnologists in utilizing them in different unique ways.