• Korean Journal of Microbiology
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• v.54 no.4
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• pp.410-419
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• 2018

It is urgently required to construct safety data on agricultural by-products imported for use as medium materials for domestic mushroom production. However, research on microorganisms is insufficient. This study was conducted to investigate the presence of bacteria that have the possibility of harmful effects on human, plants and mushroom in wheat straw, peatmoss, cottonseed hull, cottonseed meal, and beet pulp imported from Australia, Canada, China, Egypt, Germany. Bacteria were found in the range of $1.35{\times}10^2$ to $8.34{\times}10^6CFU/g$. As a result of 16S rDNA sequence analysis, total of 19 genera and 45 species of bacteria were identified. Bacillus genus was dominant, followed by Paenibacillus genus. At the species level, diverse species was in the order of Firmicute, Proteobacteria and Actinobacteria. Regarding the agricultural by-products, straw and peat moss had more diverse bacteria than other agricultural by-products. Among the indentified bacteria, 6 species of 5 genera (Enterobacter asburiae, Enterobacter ludwigii, Stenotrophomonas maltophilia, Pseudomonas monteilii, Bacillus anthracis, and Cellulosimicrobium funkei) were present as potent harmful bacteria to human. Surprisingly, both the human and plant pathogenic Klebsiella pneumoniae subsp. pneumonia was present. Bacillus altitudinis was present as a plant pathogen. Lysinibacillus sphaericus, an insect pathogen, and Ochrobactrum pseudogrignonense, a mushroom pathogen, were also present. The results of this study confirmed that several kinds of pathogenic bacteria were present in the agricultural by-products for the mushroom cultivation medium imported into Korea. Our work suggests that hygiene inspection and management is urgently needed for imported agricultural by-products to be safely used for mushroom production.