Changes in fungal population of fly ash and vinasse mixture during vermicomposting by Eudrilus eugeniae and Eisenia fetida: Documentation of cellulase isozymes in vermicompost

Fly ash (FA) and vinasse (VN), two industrial wastes, are generated in huge amounts and cause serious hazards to the environment. In this experiment, different proportions of these two wastes were used as food for two epigeic earthworms (Eisenia fetida and Eudrilus eugeniae) to standardize the recycling technique of these two wastes and to study their effect on fungal especially cellulolytic fungal population, cellulase activity and their isozyme pattern, chitin content and microbial biomass of waste mixture during vermicomposting. Increasing VN proportion from 25% to 50% or even higher, counts of both fungi and cellulolytic fungi in waste mixtures were significantly (P ⩽ 0.05) increased during vermicomposting. Higher cellulase activity in treatments having 50% or more vinasse might be attributed to the significantly (P ⩽ 0.05) higher concentration of group I isozyme while concentrations of other isozymes (group II and III) of cellulase were statistically at par. Higher chitin content in vinasse-enriched treatments suggested that fungal biomass and fungi-to-microbial biomass ratio in these treatments were also increased due to vermicomposting. Results revealed that Eudrilus eugeniae and Eisenia fetida had comparable effect on FA and VN mixture during vermicomposting. Periodical analysis of above-mentioned biochemical and microbial properties and nutrient content of final vermicompost samples indicated that equal proportion (1:1, w/w) of FA and VN is probably the optimum composition to obtain best quality vermicompost.