COMBINATION OF CONVENTIONAL AND IN-SILICO APPROACH FOR IDENTIFYING AN INDUSTRIALLY IMPORTANT ISOLATE OF AEROMONAS

Abstract

Ammonia is required for various commercial applications while its production by standard process is immensely energy intense. Dairy industry on the other hand produces huge volume of effluent needing treatment before discharge. This study aims at developing an eco-friendly microbial approach for conversion of dairy industry effluent into ammonia under atmospheric pressure and 37°C temperature at laboratory scale. Thus the need for huge energy for ammonia production would be avoided. Moreover the dairy effluent would generate revenue while getting treated. This study is also an attempt to develop a bioinformatics approach for strain identification. Standard cultivation techniques and in-silico approach of analysis of draft genome was undertaken to decipher the identity of this industrially important strain. Aeromonas sp. MCC 2167 (isolated from active dairy sludge) was capable of treating un-amended dairy effluent with 6% inoculum while producing ammonia as by product at a 11 folds higher rate than the modified Habers Process. Though the strain showed maximum identity with Aeromonas hydrophila, there were certain differences in terms of substrate utilization. Majority of the contigs showed identity with Aeromonas hydrophila, however there was significant difference among the two strains in terms of intergenomic distance (genome to genome distance calculator from DSMZ), inversion and frame shift (dot plot analysis) as well as genome rearrangement (MAUVE analysis). As per the rapid annotation using subsystem technology analysis 53% of the contigs belong to the subsystem category while the remaining 47% do not match with existing sequences in the database. The above finding proposes bioinformatics validation of the wetlab based data pointing towards this industrially important strain to be a novel isolate of Aeromonas sp. This would lead to an energy efficient economically viable alternative for ammonia production while treating large bulk of effluent generated from dairy industry that needs to be treated before being discharged.