Earthworm Case Study

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Abstract The medicinal value of earthworms has been known for centuries. The earthworms are the source of proteins, peptides, enzymes and physiologically active substances. Thus in the present study, the earthworm skin extracts were prepared and subjected to antimicrobial activity which was determined by the agar well diffusion method. The antimicrobial substances showed activity against Serratia marcescens. The molecular weight of the peptide from skin extract was found to be ~3kDa by SDS – PAGE and confirmed by zymogram analysis. Further the earthworm was identified by morphological and COI gene sequence analysis and resulted to be Wegeneriona sps. This study may lead to the formulation of new antimicrobial drug from the earthworm skin extract. Key word: Antimicrobial peptide; COI; Serratia marcescens; Wegeneriona sp; SDS-PAGE Introduction The earthworm is distinctive from saprozoic organisms. Earthworms are ancient creatures, which have survived on apex of the earth at least 700 million years ago (Cho et al., 1998). Earthworms are usually precise the same as a relatively well known group of soil invertebrate from both ecological and taxonomical perception. Earthworms are enforced to adopted and survive in this type of environments (Muhamad et al., 2006). The earthworm skin play a key role in the everyday survival of amphibians and …show more content…

The length 80-110 mm; diameter 3-5 mm (Fig.1). The arrangement of setae is very strong. The anterior region shows the prostomium which is epilobus. On the ventrolateral surface, the body segments 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 shows the presence of spermathecal openings. Exactly on the 12 segment, a pair of female genital openings is present. Segments 13, 14 and 15 forms the unsegmented collar like structure called the clitellum. On the 16 segment, pair of male genital openings is present, bellow the

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