ENZYMATIC ACTIVITY, AND SECONDARY METABOLITES OF FUNGAL ISOLATES FROM LAKE SONACHI IN KENYA

Abstract

The soda lakes of Kenya provide an extreme environment where diverse groups of microorganisms thrive. They arecharacterized by great variation in temperature, halophillic and alkaliphilic- extreme conditions. Lake Sonnachi hasbeen the study site for this research. The study sort to isolate, characterize and identify fungi, screen for potentialexo-enzymes and secondary metabolites production that may be of industrial application.Malt extract agar wasused for the isolation of fungi and six (6) isolates were recovered. Inhibition zones were used to measure theenzymatic and antimicrobial activity of the isolates. GC-MC analysis was done on the filtrates extracted from thefungi to identify secondary metabolites.Molecular characterization of the 18s rDNA was done using fungal primerswas used in this study.Phylogenetic was inferred using neighbor- joining method. The fungal isolates were alighneddiferrent genera, Acrimonies sp., Scopulariopsis sp, Verticilium sp. Fusarium sp and Paecilomyces sp. The fungalisolates produce different types of enzymes (cellulases, proteases, pectinases and lipases) and metabolites (acids,ketones, quinones, alcohols, esters etc). A phylogenetic tree of fungal isolates has been constructed using theneighbor- joining method showing the evolutionary relationship of the isolates with other kwonfungi.Antimicrobial assay showed that most of the fungal isolates produced inhibition zones ranging from 0.1 to4mm, an indication of presence of compounds with antimicrobial activity against most of the test organisms, E.coli,B. subtilis, S.aureas etc, used in this study. Results indicate that Lake Sonachi, a soda lake has fungal species thatare capable of producing enzymes and metabolites with antimicrobial activity.