Biodiversity and biotechnological applications of psychrotrophic microbes isolated from Indian Himalayan regions

Abstract

Extreme cold environments are the hot spots of biodiver-sity of diverse groups of microbes including archaea, bac-teria and fungi. Prospecting the cold habitats of the Indian Himalayan region has led to the isolation of a great diversi-ty of psychrotrophic microbes. The cold-adapted microbes have potential biotechnological applications in agriculture, medicine and industry as they can produce cold-adapted enzymes, anti-freezing compounds, antibiotics and possess diverse multifarious plant growth promoting attributes. Cold adapted microbes are ubiquitous in nature and can be isolated from permanently ice-covered lakes, cloud glaciers, and hilly regions. Microbes recovered using culture depen-dent techniques belong to different phylum Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Basidiomycota, Chlamydiae, Chloroflexi, Cy-anobacteria, Firmicutes and Proteobacteria of diverse gen-era namely: Arthrobacter, Bacillus, Brevundimonas, Cellu-losimicrobium, Citricoccus, Enterobacter, Exiguobacterium, Flavobacterium, Janthinobacterium, Lysinibacillus, Methylo-bacterium, Paenibacillus, Pantoea, Planococcus, Pontibacil-lus, Providencia, Pseudomonas, Psychrobacter, Rhodococcus, Sanguibacter, Sphingobacterium, Sporosarcina, Staphylococ-cus, Stenotrophomonas and Virgibacillus. The cold adapted microbes with multifunctional attributes may be applied in industry and agriculture sectors