Identification of Lactobacillus Plantarum Strains Using Rapid Molecular Techniques

The study was under taken to identify Lactobacillus plantarum stains at molecular level by using PCR and RAPD. The genus and species specific PCR primers for Lactobacillus plantarum was used for the identification of the probiotic cultures. The randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) technique was used to produce potential strain-specific markers to differentiate the two stains of L.plantarum. The RAPD technique is a PCR-based discrimination method in which short arbitrary primers anneal to multiple random target sequences. The genus specific PCR assay conducted using the template DNA resulted in an amplification of 250 bp PCR product and species specific PCR resulted in 248 bp amplification. The random primer OPAP-01 was used for RAPD PCR. The banding patterns obtained with the two cultures were quite distinct and good enough to discriminate them as two separate strains. Molecular level identification methods are a powerful alternative to the conservative differentiation of bacteria by plating. These techniques will certainly prove very useful when studying the presence of probiotic strains in vivo.