Immobilization is usually a method used for the preservation of enzymes as this method provides enhanced resistance to the changes in certain environmental conditions like pH/temperature. The advantage of IMB of live bacterial cells is especially high due to their role in environmental monitoring due to their low cost, easy handling and high sensitivity to the environment. Through our project we tried to show that this method of IMB is effective in the preservation of microorganisms. We used natural dyes during the course of our project which were extracted from grinding of fruits and vegetables such as pomegranate, beetroot and carrot. We used Sodium Alginate beads (Idris and Suzana, 2006) so that there were a good number of beads formed that helped for the proper entrapment of microorganisms E.Coli and bacillus (Kierstan and Bucke, 1977) for future use. Natural dyes were chosen over synthetic dyes due to their environmental friendliness, cost effectiveness and less complexity. To check if the method had been effective, we prepared a growth curve to check the growth of the microorganism and found out that this method could be used to store the microbes for a monthÂ’s duration
Key words: Immobilization (IMB), sodium alginate beads, natural dye, extraction
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