Isolation and characterization of Pectinolytic bacteria from kenaf retting effluent & Palm Oil Mill Effluent (POME) sediment

Kenaf is well-known for its fiber due to its wide usage in various industry such as textile, building material, and paper making. The fiber with strong mechanical strength enable it to be recognized as multifunctional raw materials. Several methods are used to obtain kenaf fiber. For example, conventional water retting, enzymatic retting, mechanical retting, and chemical retting. However, these methods are ineffective for good quality fiber production in large scale. Therefore, the idea of augmented retting was introduced. In order to realize this idea, the potential pectinolytic bacteria cultures and their production of pectinases should be well understood. In this research, the kenaf retting effluent and POME sediment were chosen as sample to isolate pectinolytic bacteria. Eleven pectinolytic bacteria were successfully isolated and six of them were identified as Enterobacter kobei, Herbaspirillum huttiense, Pantoea dispersa strain 68, Bacterium strain BS0052, Enterobacter sp strain HSTU-ASn40, and uncultured Bacterium with similarity lower than 98.7 % based on 16S rRNA sequence. Other five isolates were unsuccessfully for 16S rRNA gene analysis and thus only be identified by morphological characteristics and gram-staining. The pectinase enzyme assay was conducted by DNS method. The pectinase activity for isolates were in the range of 0.0080 - 0.2195 U/mL. The isolate S2 showed the highest pectinase activity which is 0.2195 U/mL. Thus, isolate S2 posses greater potential to degrade pectin among others.