Objective
While in the last decade our understanding of the molecular biology and genetics of some lactic acid bacteria (LAB) has increased greatly, very limited attention has been given to thermophilic LAB, although some of them (principally Streptococcus thermophilus, Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Lo helveticus) are widely used in the manufacturing of many French, Italian and Swiss cheeses as well as yoghurt and acidified milk products. To fill the gap between thermophilic LAB and other industrially important microorganisms, a coordinate effort of 9 European laboratories from 6 Countries, with complementary skills and interests, will be performed. This consortium, for its size and distribution of roles, represents an important opportunity for EU to take the world leadership in this growing field. The ambition of the project is to perform a broad study of thermophilic LAB by means of all the tools made available by recent microbiological research. The whole topic will be divided into the following four packages and will be basically devoted to food-grade strains. Mutual flow of data among packages will be constant.
Package I. Metabolic engineering. The work will be aimed at understanding and improving the following important metabolic traits: lactose/galactose metabolism, polysaccharide secretion and properties, proteolysis, lactic acid fermentation, and amino acid biosynthesis and transport.
Packaqe II. Environmental and stress response. This part of the work will be aimed at gaining a better knowledge and an improvement of the adaptive responses of thermophilic LAB to changes such as pH, temperature, nutrient and salt concentration, which are common in food fermentations.
Package III. Expression and secretion systems. Such systems, which have proven to be essential strain improvement tools for mesophilic strains, will be developed and applied to thermophilic LAB: to this purpose various inducible promoters and secretion vectors encoding fusion proteins will be isolated. Package IV. Genetic transfer. A more advanced understanding and a facilitated use of these tools (mainly conjugation and transduction in various species and genomic integration in L. helveticus) will be pursued in order to ease strain construction.
Within completion of the project we expect to bring into the literature a number o scientific papers that will describe in detail relevant metabolic traits and produce cloning vectors, strains secreting fused proteins and information about the mechanisms of gene expression.
Our work is also expected to allow us to optimize strain usage and to select new starter strains for better performance in cheese and yoghurt making. Pilot and industrial scale fermentation technology to test our strains will be available from our industrial partners. Biotechnological innovations deriving from this project will be made available to external users in the spirit of EU guidelines.
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.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural scienceschemical sciencesorganic chemistryorganic acids
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmicrobiologybacteriology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomoleculescarbohydrates
- natural scienceschemical sciencesorganic chemistryamines
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmolecular biology
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Topic(s)
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
80134 Napoli
Italy