ABSTRACT

Indonesia's potential as world's largest clove oil producer is supported by the development of clove plantations in Indonesia. One of the effort to develop the quantity and quality of eugenol from Indonesia clove plants is by bioconverting eugenol to vanillin. This study was aimed to characterize ech and fcs genes in soil bacteria from clove plantation in North Sulawesi and Central Java which has the potential to bioconvert eugenol to vanillin. The soil bacteria from clove plantations in North Sulawesi and Central Java were isolated using selective mediums. DNA extraction was carried out using Geneaid Presto™ Mini gDNA Bacteria Kit. The isolated genomes from DNA extraction were analyzed and carried out by agarose gel electrophoresis. Both primers for PCR were designed manually by aligning multiple ech and fcs genes sequences of Pseudomonas spp. And Burkholderia spp. in NCBI GenBank data. PCR analysis was performed within forward and reverse primers to detect ech and fcs genes in the isolate. Furthermore, the amplicons was analyzed using agarose gel electrophoresis to show ech and fcs genes’ bands. The last step was to analyze the result of DNA sequencing using BLAST method in NCBI. The existence of ech and fcs genes in each isolate were varied. Based on the DNA Sanger Sequencing result, the bacteria species found in the samples from North Sulawesi were mainly Pseudomonas sp., while from Central Java were mainly Burkholderia spp. and one species was identified as Bacillus sp. To conclude, soil bacterias in clove plantation in North Sulawesi and Central Java carry the genes which have the potential to bioconvert eugenol to vanillin.

Keywords : bioconversion, clove, ech gene, fcs gene, soil bacteria