Isolation and characterization of culturable bacteria from tropical coastal waters

In this study we isolated and characterized some culturable bacteria from tropical coastal waters of Peninsular Malaysia. We obtained between 0.23 and 1.85 × 103 cfu mL–1 in the Zobell 2216E medium, and cultured 0.04% to 0.12% of total bacterial counts. Different bacterial strains were then selected by 16S rDNA RFLP using four restriction enzymes (DdeI, HhaI, RsaI, and Sau3AI), of which HhaI gave the most RFLP patterns. A total of 54 unique strains were obtained and these were identified by their 16S rDNA gene sequence. These bacterial strains could be divided into five classes: 38 strains of γ-Proteobacteria (61.1%); 3 strains of α-Proteobacteria (5.5%); 2 strains of the Cytophaga-Flavobacterium-Bacteroides group (3.7%); 3 strains of high GC, Gram-positive bacteria (5.5%); and 13 strains of low GC, Gram-positive bacteria (24.1%). These isolates have good potential for further biotechnological studies since about 56% of the isolates exhibited amylase activity, whereas 36% and 18% of the isolates had protease and lipase, respectively. Most (>70%) of the isolates also produced poly-ß-hydroxybutyrate.