Nowadays, there is increasing interest in the production of functional foods, particularly probiotic foods. Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) particularly strains of Lactobacillus are important bacteria in food microbiology and human nutrition due to their ability to fermented food production and have received considerable attention as probiotics. The traditional fermented dairy foods as a rich source...

Probiotics are living microorganisms providing health beneficial effect to the host (1). Probiotics have been used for the treatment or prevention of various diseases related to diarrhea (2), cholesterol (3) immune function (4), and inflammatory bowel disease (5). In addition, recent study also presents that probiotic bacteria in the Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus genera are able to have the...

An erythromycin-resistant strain of probiotic Lactobacillus paracasei ssp. paracasei LBC-1 (LBC-1e) was added to part-skim Mozzarella cheese in alginate-microencapsulated or free form at a level of 10(8) and 10(7)cfu/g, respectively. Survival of LBC-1e and total lactic acid bacteria (LAB) was investigated through the pasta filata process of cheese making (in which the cheese curd was heated to ...

The complete nucleotide sequence (2389 bp) of the cryptic plasmid pLF1311 from Lactobacillus fermentum VKM1311 was determined. DNA sequence analysis revealed the putative coding regions for a replicative protein (RepB), its repressor (RepA) and double-stranded (dso) and single-stranded (sso) origins. pLF1311 belongs to the pE194 family of rolling circle-replicating plasmids. A derivative of pLF...

Whole-genome sequencing was performed for Lactobacillus parakefiri JCM 8573T to confirm its hitherto controversial taxonomic position. Here, we report its first reliable reference genome. Genome-wide metrics, such as average nucleotide identity and digital DNA-DNA hybridization, and phylogenomic analysis based on multiple genes supported its taxonomic status as a distinct species in the genus L...

Testing of susceptibility to 13 antibiotics was performed with 90 isolates of Lactobacillus, Leuconostoc, and Pediococcus. MICs at which 90% of the isolates tested were inhibited by HMR3647, erythromycin, and ciprofloxacin were 0.015, 0.125 and 32 microg/ml, respectively. The penicillin MIC was > or = 16 microg/ml against 26.2% of the studied Lactobacillus sp. isolates and 50% of Lactobacillus ...

The microbiological characterization of lactobacilli is historically well developed, but the genomic analysis is recent. Because of the widespread use of Lactobacillus helveticus in cheese technology, information concerning the heterogeneity in this species is accumulating rapidly. Recently, the genome of five L. helveticus strains was sequenced to completion and compared with other genomically...

Designing degenerate PCR primers for templates of unknown nucleotide sequence may be a very difficult task. In this paper, we present a new method to design degenerate primers, implemented in family-specific degenerate primer design (FAS-DPD) computer software, for which the starting point is a multiple alignment of related amino acids or nucleotide sequences. To assess their efficiency, four d...