Isolation, Screening and Identification of Biopolymer Producing Bacillus cereus from Vegetable Wastes

Plastic materials are causing tremendous damage to the environment. To mitigate the use of synthetic plastics, eco-friendly biopolymers have emerged as an alternative to plastics. Biodegradable plastics such as polyhydroxy butyrate (PHB) are currently used in several synthetic applications similar to biopolymers. The present research was conducted to screen bacteria from vegetable wastes for PHB production. The PHB producing bacteria were screened using Sudan Black-B stain followed by microscopic examination for presence of PHB granules. The PHB was produced through a shake flask fermentation method. The significant PHB-producing bacteria was sequenced by 16S rRNA sequencing (1200bp) (NCIMRef: 2023/Seq-160), by NCIM, Pune, India. The sequencing report showed that the bacterial isolate has 99.93% closest homology to Bacillus cereus. Further, we have deposited this sequence in GenBank (SUB14283541 907R_Seq160_CB4 PP422177, SUB14283541 907R_Seq160_CB4_RC PP422178, SUB14283541 704F_Seq160_CB4 PP422179, and SUB14283541 907RC_704F_Seq160_CB4 PP422180) for further reference and studies. The Bacillus cereus CB 4-derived biopolymer precipitated with acetone has shown maximum PHB yield of 2.7 gL-1. Further research prospects would focus on the optimization of biopolymer production and its quality testing on various parameters.