J. Gen. Appl. Microbiol., 51, 353–360 (2005)

The substrates of composting with primary components of plant material such as cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin are rather difficult to biodegrade and reduce the availability of the other polymers by means of a physical restriction (Ladisch et al., 1983). Studies have showed that it is of great importance that increase of the microbial populations especially the lignocellulose-degrading microorganisms in the compost will help in enhancing lignocellulose-degrading waste decomposition and thus hasten the process of composting with different substrates (Beguin and Aubert, 1994; EL-Din et al., 2000; Hart et al., 2002; Iiyami et al., 1996; Kakezawa et al., 1992; Lu et al., 2004; Straatsma et al., 1994; Tengerdy and Szakacs, 2003). Moreover, agronomical study showed that inoculation of compost with lignocellulose-degrading microorganisms is a potentially successful strategy for improving the product for agronomic purposes (El-Din et al., 2000; Lynch, 1986). Yunnan province is the biggest flower production base and an important vegetable production area in China. Pollution of plantation wastes, mainly as flower stalk and vegetable wastes have become an increasing problem to the environment, especially to the surface water bodies of Dianchi Lake, the most famous plateau lake in Southwest China. As cellulose is a major component of these agricultural wastes, a technology using extrinsic inocula to remove or reduce ligno-cellulose during waste composting was developed in a previous study (Lu et al., 2004). The scope of this study is to isolate and characterize the predominant mesophilic cellulose-degrading bacteria (CDB) from a previous lignocellulose-degrading enrichment, thus to provide biological information for their potential Isolation and characterization of mesophilic cellulose-degrading bacteria from flower stalks-vegetable waste co-composting system