Objective
A variety of cheeses, meats and vegetables are fermented using lactic acid bacteria (LAB). These fermentation processes, largely used in Europe, are highly susceptible to bacteriophage (phage) attack. This leads to considerable turmoil in the context of tight manufacturing schedules and interferes with ensuring consistently high product quality, with the consequent negative effect on the economics of the manufacturing process.
To face this problem, improved strains should be constructed, by genetic manipulation of the phage-resistance capacity of industrial strains with otherwise excellent cheese-making properties. This could be achieved either by using natural phage defense mechanisms or by designing new defence strategies directed against key steps of the phage growth cycle. To construct highly resistant strains for a long term efficient control of fermentation, we propose to:
i) Design new phage defence strategies. A better knowledge of phage biology would allow to abolish phage development either by preventing some key steps of phage growth, or by using phage regulatory circuits to control expression of toxic genes and to induce premature death of infected cells. We shall characterize gene functions essential to phage development and carry out studies of the regulation of the different steps of phage development. Lactococcal phages of two main species of industrial concern will be studied. Defense mechanisms preventing phage replication or inducing cell death will be designed. The background knowledge acquired on lactococcal phages will be adapted to those of other phage species: Streptococcus thermophilus, Lactobacillus helveticus and Lactobacillus casei.
ii) Increase the efficiency of natural phage defence mechanisms. To protect strains efficiently against a large phage spectrum, it will be necessary to increase the effectiveness of such mechanisms and to associate those acting on different steps of the phage growth and/or on different phage species. Therefore, we will characterize additional mechanisms present in industrial strains and improve the efficiency of two mechanisms which have been shown to have a very large phage spectrum.
Exchanges between research and industry that are crucial for a good development of this project will be favoured by the participation of one of the most important company for the production of LAB starters.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- engineering and technology mechanical engineering manufacturing engineering
- natural sciences chemical sciences organic chemistry organic acids
- natural sciences biological sciences microbiology virology
- medical and health sciences medical biotechnology genetic engineering
- engineering and technology industrial biotechnology bioprocessing technologies fermentation
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Coordinator
78352 Jouy-en-Josas
France
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