CHICKEN FEATHER DEGRADATION BY KERATINOLYTIC ASPERGILLUS SPECIES ISOLATED FROM FEATHER WASTE DUMPING SOIL

Abstract

Slaughterhouses and poultry processing units worldwide dispose of huge amount of chicken feathers that accumulate as solid waste in the environment and cause serious consequences. Keratinases are a group of enzymes, produced by microorganisms have the ability to degrade tough recalcitrant keratin that is abundantly present in chicken feathers. Soil sample was collected from a feather dumping site at Virudhunagar (9° 35' 13.9524'’ N Latitude and 77° 57' 5.1516'’ E Longitude), Tamil Nadu, India. Soil sample was serially diluted, inoculated on to feather meal agar plates and incubated at 37 °C for 7 days to isolate keratinolytic fungal strains. The isolated strains were screened for proteolytic activity on skim milk agar for 8 days and three better strains were identified based on morphology, mycelial growth, and structure of hyphae using lactophenol cotton blue staining and confirmed by ITS primer sequencing method as Aspergillus niger, Aspergillus terreus and Aspergillus flavus respectively. Different range of pH (7 to 11), temperature (25 to 45 °C), substrate (bovine serum albumin, feather, peptone and gelatin) and feather concentration (0.5g, 1g, 1.5g and 2g) were tested to find out the optimum conditions for the growth and keratin degradation of the chosen fungal strains. The temperature and feather concentration for the optimum growth of A. niger, A. terreus and A. flavus were 25 °C and 1.5g, 45 °C and 1g and 30 °C and 1.5g respectively. All three Aspergillus species exerted better growth at pH 9 and with bovine serum albumin as the substrate.