摘要：Finished leather and leather articles, manufactured from the animal skin are highly Susceptible for fungal attack. Theanimal skin contains large number of microbes, derived from air, water, soil and extraneous filth, when the animal is alive, most of these microbes have little effect on the skin. But after the removal of the skin from the dead animals, during finishing operation, all microbes find themselves in a perfect medium for the growth and immediately start multiplying at an enormous rate. The observations of many types of leather samples will give a large number of fungi which grow and infest the various types of finished leather and cause deterioration The present study deals with the collection of various types of finished leather samples and infested leather articles from different places. Isolations were made from such samples to know about the qualitative and quantitative spectrum of fungi to deteriorate the collected samples. In all leather samples and leather articles total 52 fungal forms belonging to 19 different genera were isolated. The present investigation provides impetus to develop certain preventive measures to make these finished leather free from infestation of fungi under the conditions of high R.H. and optimum temperature, the knowledge of specific microflora and their relative capacity to infest leather is necessary for solving this problem.
