Abstract
It is well known that actinomycetes would be useful for screening of biologically active compounds. Not only to isolate diverse actinomycete strains but to ferment those strains effectively would be important. Seven hundred and forty six strains were isolated from Cheju province, 216 strains were from Chungnam province, 158 strains were from the natural caves at Chungbuk and Kangwon provinces and 202 strains were from Chungwon area at Chungbuk province. All of these 1,322 strains were fermented on a small scale using two different media and tested for their antimicrobial activities against four bacterial strains and one yeast strain. As the result, 12.3% of those isolates were active against Staphylococcus aureus KCTC 1916, 7.6% were Staphylococcus aureus KCTC 1928, 3.9% were Escherichia coli KCTC 1924, 3.0% were Candida albicans KCTC 1940, and 2.2% were Salmonella typhimurium KCTC 1926. About 40% of those isolates showed antimicrobial activities at both two media but the others showed at either one. According to the genus of isolated strains, Streptomyces and Micromonospora showed activities with higher frequencies than others.