DOI: 10.36347/sajb.2013.v01i05.005

Pages: 165-178

Thermophiles are the microorganisms that live and grow in extremely hot environment that would kill most other microorganisms. They can be isolated from a number of marine and terrestrial geothermally heated habitats including shallow terrestrial hot springs, hyderothermal vents, sediment from volcanic islands and deep sea hyderothermal vents. Thermophiles have been documented as a very good source of industrial enzymes which are thermostable. So in the present investigation, cultivable diversity of 101 thermophilic microbial strains isolated from hot springs of northern Himalayan region of Himachal Pradesh has been studied. Amongst these strains, only 2 were fungi and rest were bacteria. These isolates have been found to be aerobic and sustaining a temperature of or above 50 0C. All the isolates were checked with respect to their industrial enzyme production potential and were found to be a good source of amylase, cellulase and xylanase. Maximum enzyme producing strains were selected based on the enzyme units of amylase, cellulase and xylanase produced and were identified on the basis of 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequence analysis. Selected isolates were identified mainly as Bacillus subtilis NM (G), Bacillus megaterium NM 9, Paenibacillus N1 and a fungal isolate as Myceliophthora thermophila SH1.