Cultivation Techniques of Rare Actinobacteria

Actinobacteria are widely distributed in natural and man-made environments, and play an important role in the degradation of organic matter. They are also known as a rich source of antibiotics and bioactive compounds which finds considerable importance in industry. Included among these actinobacteria are nonstreptomycete actinobacteria with significant number of associated bioactive compounds, which are not cultivated on regular actinobacterial isolation media. In order to obtain the entire spectrum of bioactive compounds from actinobacteria, it is necessary to introduce new culture media for both streptomycete and rare nonstreptomycete species and pretreatment of samples being a necessity in most instances. Hence, in this chapter experiments pertaining to isolation of rare actinobacteria using suitable medium from various sources with sample pretreatments are explained.