An indigenous substitute for peptone as the basic ingredient of culture media

From times immemorial, peptone, a semi digested protein is being used as a basic ingredient in microbiological culture media throughout the globe. Peptone hold up and broadening the growth of bacteria from small inoculate, free from ferment -able carbohydrates, has a very low content of contaminating bacteria and a very low content of copper. Keeping in view the above criteria, every effort was made to find a suitable and cost effective substitute for peptone. The use of solid media, dates back 1884,on the advice of Frau Hesse to Robert Koch who used agar as  coagulate and consolidate liaison in culture media. This made him the pioneer in isolation of pure cultures. Since a long time peptones are the basic ingredients of culture media. They are the breakdown products of proteins of animal origin. The cost of 500 gm of Peptone is Rs 1999/-Because their high nutritive value they proved to be to be good as cattle feeds. At the same time they are very cheap. The vegetable proteins obtained from these cakes of oil seeds are comparable to peptone in their composition and the cost is only 1/100 the cost of peptone or even less. Keeping this in view an attempt is made to substitute peptone with the powders obtained from the cakes of oil seeds like coconut, groundnut and gingelly and a preliminary report on this work is presented here.