Alleviation of Cold Stress by Psychrotrophic Microbes

Psychrotrophs have the ability to survive in extreme conditions of lower temperature ranges from 0 °C to 20 °C. Psychrotrophic microorganisms mainly include bacteria, archaea and yeast, but among them, bacteria predominate in polar environment and archaea are more widespread in cold and deep ocean waters. They have evolved a variety of adaptation mechanisms such as gene expression modification and production of cold stress protein to cope up with stress induced at such a lower temperature. Cold active enzymes produced by psychrotrophs have wide applications in the food and pharmaceutical industry. Moreover these have wide applications in agriculture as they have the ability to promote plant growth at low temperature.