Abstract

Every day there are millions of the organic wastes were produced around the world and the processing of organic waste in to useful product is the difficult process. There are number of techniques were used to convert the organic waste into the useful products like bio fuel, manure etc., among them the mesophilic process using earthworms named Vermi-composting is one of the most eminent technology to process large amount of organic waste at low cost. The most significant of the process is not only to improve the fertility of the soil but also improve the diversity of useful microorganism by eradicating the harmful one.The current study is to investigate the presence of the microbial diversity in vermicast feeded with different source (cow dung, slurry, and press-mud) and find the best one by compare among them. The vermicomposting unit used in this study was placed at the Periyar Maniammai University, Vallam, Thanjavur, Tamilnadu, india. The process was done by open bed method and six separate beds were constructed in the following sequence 1- slurry, 2- slurry with earthworms, 3-cow dung, 4-cow dung with earthworms, 5-pressmud, and 6-pressmud with earthworms. On the 42nd day the process was terminated for samples 2,4 & 6 and the samples were collected from each bed and proceeded to the meta-genomic analysis to observe the presence of different combination of microorganisms in different composting bed. The meta-genomics sequence results were categorized from higher order phylum to lower species level and it indicates that large quantity and diversity of microbes like Bacteroidetes, Proteobacteria etc., were present in all the vermicast when compare with the non compost samples. Finally, we concluded that our results indicate vermicast obtained from the night soil slurry did not have any pathogenic bacteria like Salmonella spp., Escherichia coli, Enterobacter spp., and Enterococcus spp. In addition to that, it had most harmless diversified bacteria useful for the plant growth and mostprominent one when compare with others in our study. In summary, analysis using meta-genomic sequencing is the most predominant technology for the characterization of microbial composition in vermicast and it should be the most supporting tool to determine necessary measures to handle manure safely.