Abstract
Lactococcus lactis is a lactic acid bacterium widely used as a starter culture in the manufacture of dairy products, especially a wide variety of cheeses. Improved industrial strains would help to manufacture better food products that can meet the industry’s and consumer’s demands with respect to e.g. quality, taste, texture and shelf life. Bacteriophage infection of L. lactis starter cultures represents one of the main causes of fermentation failure and consequent economic losses for the dairy industry. In this study, however, we aim at employing bacteriophages for beneficial purposes. We developed an experimental setup to assess whether phage-mediated horizontal gene transfer could be used to enhance the genetic characteristics of L. lactis strains in accordance with the European law regarding the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the food industry.Although we could not show the transfer of chromosomal DNA we did successfully transduce two dissimilar plasmids from L. lactis strain MG1363 to one of its derivatives employing three different lactococcal bacteriophages.
Highlights
Lactococcus lactis is the most-used lactic acid bacterium (LAB) in the dairy industry, where it is employed as starter culture for the manufacture of products such as buttermilk, quark, and especially a wide variety of hard and soft cheeses [1]
Our goal was to provide a proof of concept that bacteriophage transduction may be used in an industrial setup to mobilize plasmid and chromosomal bacterial DNA among L. lactis strains with the aim of improving their metabolic activities
The second important parameter that we used for bacteriophage selection was their ability to infect the plasmid-free laboratory strain Lactococcus lactis MG1363
Summary
Lactococcus lactis is the most-used lactic acid bacterium (LAB) in the dairy industry, where it is employed as starter culture for the manufacture of products such as buttermilk, quark, and especially a wide variety of hard and soft cheeses [1]. It is mainly responsible for the rapid acidification of the raw milk, and for the improvement of the shelf life and the development of organoleptic qualities of the fermented foods [2,3,4].
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