Microbiome Analysis and Characterization of Carrageenan in Infected Farmed Kappaphycus sp.

Marine living resources are considered as an asset for their valuable materials for the society and the derived by products like drug, food, materials, etc. The occurrence of ice-ice disease in farmed Kappaphycus alvarezii has tremendous implication on the carrageenan industry. Microbiome plays the major role in determining the health of seaweed. This study will attempt to know the variation in the microbiome population in both healthy and infected seaweed, to determine the role of any uncultured bacterial population in inducing the ice-ice disease in farmed Kappaphycus alvarezii. This disease may lead to poor quality yield of carrageenan and this polymer will further studied in detail. Thus, sample were collected from coastal region of Rameswaram. To determine the effect of this diseases on the quality of carrageenan, homogenized solution of thalli from healthy and disease K. alvarezii will be investigated using FTIR, GC-MS, and Plant sectioning method of analysis. Genomic DNA of bacterial population present in the diseased part of K. alvarezii was isolated followed by PCR amplification of 16S rRNA gene sequence in V3-V4 region. The obtained gene sequence is subjected to advanced BLAST analysis. After identification the phylogenetic comparison will be done by using NGS (Next Generation Sequencing) and the sequence will be submitted to NCBI at GenBank as a repository.