Evaluation of Siderophore Production by Different Promising Microbial Isolates

Indian alkaline soils are deficient in iron due to high pH, high calcium carbonate, highly permeable coarse textured soils, and soils low in organic carbon content. This study is carried out to increase the iron use efficiency of soil by using promising microbial isolates. Production of siderophore by promising microbial isolates is a greatest invention which help in increasing uptake of iron. A short-term laboratory experiment was carried “To evaluate the siderophore productions by different promising microbial isolates using chrome azurol S assay technique”. Ten microbial isolates were inoculated on plate as well as in broth medium. Plates were observed for orange halo formation around the bacterial growth. The size of orange halo around the colony of each microbial isolates was measured. The broth cultures inoculated with inoculum, incubated at 28 ± 20C for 24-72 hr with constant shaking at 120 rpm. After the incubation, the culture broths were centrifuged at 10,000 rpm for 10 min. The cell free supernatants were subjected to quantitative estimation of siderophores by CAS-shuttle, absorbance was measured at 630 nm against a reference consisting of 0.5 ml of uninoculated broth and 0.5 ml of CAS reagent. Obtained results indicated that in both plate and broth assays medium inoculated with strain Pseudomonas fluorescens show significantly higher orange halo formation around the growth and maximum siderophore content in aliquot. Inoculation of this plant growth promoting microbial isolates will be the great achievement in replacing chemical fertilizers in agriculture.