Taxonomic studies: Morphological, physiological and biochemical characteristics of the chitinolytic microorganism were studied according to the Bergey's Manual of Systematic Bacteriology (Holt et al., 1994).
To identify the bacteriwn at the gene level, Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) was performed to amplify a partial l6S rRNA gene of the bacteria. Isolation of genomic DNA, PCR amplification and sequencing of PCR product for analysis of 16S rRNA were conducted according to Sambrook et al. (1986) and Marchesi et al. (1998). A similarity search for the nucleotide sequence of l6S rRNA of the test isolate was carried out using a Blast search at NCBI (Altschul et al., 1997)