PLANT CELL BIOTECHNOLOGY AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY

Banana is an important and one of the oldest cultivated crops all over the world. It is an herbaceous plant of Musa genus. Banana is highly nutritious crop possessing high amount of potassium, fibre and carbohydrate. Apart from its nutritional value, all parts of banana plant have medicinal properties. In recent times, banana peel has been utilized in various industrial application including bio-fuel production, cosmetics and paper and pulp industry etc. Microbial and bacterial contamination is a very big problem during in vitro propagation of banana. The cost of banana production is high due to these contaminants. The objective of this study was to identify, isolate and to characterize bacterial contamination from in vitro banana tissue culture and to check the ability of different antibiotics to control these bacterial contaminations. Different morphological and biochemical tests were performed to identify the bacterial isolates. In the present study, Bacillus pumilus was isolated and identified as major contaminant bacteria in banana tissue culture raised plants. Further, three different antibiotics i.e., streptomycin, Tetracycline and Rifamycin were tested at different concentrations i.e., 50 µl and 75 µl during different time intervals to determine the efficiency of tested antibiotics for elimination of bacterial contaminants. Results concluded that streptomycin, tetracycline and rifamycin each at 50 µl of concentration successfully supressed the growth of identified bacteria while only rifamycin at both concentrations inhibited the growth of B. pumilus completely. These findings will be highly useful to achieve higher production of banana tissue culture raised plants.