Crops can become contaminated with microorganisms capable of causing human diseases while still on the plant in fields or orchards, or during harvesting. The objective of this study was to assess the contamination level of microbial load, yeasts, molds, Coliform and Escherichia coli on their surface and biodiversity indexes of microorganisms. The bacterial counts were found to be higher than the Yeast and Moulds counts. The range of bacterial population is 8.72-5.04 log cfu/g and for the fungal is 6.53 – 2.30 log cfu/g. Organisms isolated from vegetables samples included Saccharomyces, Aspergillus, Rhizopus, Staphylococcus, Klebsiella, Streptococcus, Bacillus, Escherichia, Pseudomonas, Salmonella and Diplococcus with various percentages of occurrences. Streptococcus and Aspergillus are the most frequently isolated genera in all studied crops. Staphylococcus (86.36%) and Pseudomonas (77.27%) present in the studied crops. It’s the main cause of unwanted diseases in Delhi and NCR. The biodiversity indexes i.e. Simpson (0.20) and Shannon (3.31) of microorganism show the high species richness and diversified microbial community. The microorganisms isolated are opportunistic and mostly pathogenic in nature. The microbial load also very high which gives the signal of health alertness before using these contaminated vegetables.
Aspergillus, Diplococcus, Microbial load, Streptococcus, Vegetables, Simpson Index.
© The Author(s) 2016. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License which permits unrestricted use, sharing, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.