Abstract
The increasing consumer demand for less processed and more natural food products – while improving those products’ quality, safety, and shelf-life – has raised the necessity of chemical preservative replacement. Biopreservation refers to extended storage life and enhanced safety of foods using the natural microflora and (or) their antibacterial products. Chitinolytic enzymes are of biotechnological interest, since their substrate, chitin, is a major structural component of the cell wall of fungi, which are the main cause of the spoilage of food and raw plant material. Among the several organisms, many bacteria produce chitinolytic enzymes, however, this behaviour is not general. The chitinase activity of the lactic acid bacteria is scarcely known and studied.The aim of the present study was to select Lactobacillus strains that have genes encoding chitinase, furthermore, to detect expressed enzymes and to characterise their chitinase activity. Taking into consideration the importance of chitin-bindig proteins (CBPs) in the chitinase activity, CBPs were also examined. Five Lactobacillus strains out of 43 strains from 12 different species were selected by their chitinase coding gene. The presence of the chitinase and chitin-biding protein production were confirmed, however, no chitinolytic activity has been identified.
Highlights
The increasing consumer demand for less processed and more natural food products – while improving those products’ quality, safety, and shelf-life – has raised the necessity of chemical preservative replacement
PCR amplification of bacterial strains isolated from food samples gave strong fragment band except for only one sample, so these strains belong to the Lactobacillus genus
Our results show that we could get strong, 119 bp amplified fragments by the adapted chiAF/chiAR primer pair in case of two microorganisms (L. acidophilus N2, L. delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus B397), which means that these samples hold the chitinase gene
Summary
The increasing consumer demand for less processed and more natural food products – while improving those products’ quality, safety, and shelf-life – has raised the necessity of chemical preservative replacement. The chitinase activity of the lactic acid bacteria is scarcely known and studied. Biocontrol by lactic acid bacteria (LAB) is currently the principal alternative to preservatives in food (R et al, 2016), and is widely studied because of the role and long history of use of LAB in fermented foods, their ability to produce antifungal metabolites (e.g. organic acids, hydrogen peroxide, diacetyl, bacteriocins), and their Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS). Lactic acid bacteria are safe to consume and during the processing they naturally dominate the microflora of many fermented foods. Fungi are major issue at any stage of the food chain from the postharvest storage of raw material till the end consumption of the processed foods, because of their ability to produce spores and grow in different and even harsh environments
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