Objective
Food fermentations rely on actively growing lactic acid bacteria added as starter cultures. The fermentation capabilities of lactic acid bacteria can be severely inhibited by bacteriophage (phage) infections.
In particular in the dairy field, the constant risk of phage attacks is still the major commercial problem, although identified already in 1935. Today, milk fermentations are continuously scaled up for economic reasons, and short fermentations with more than one filling of the vats per day are common. This increases the opportunities of phages to contaminate and proliferate during the production process of each day.
Due to the constant risk of economic losses, control of phage is a major area of concern in handling lactic acid bacteria as starter cultures. Introducing phage resistance genes into phage sensitive LAB to enhance their phage insensitivity has become a very attractive modern approach. Many of the phage resistance mechanisms known so far are active in the LAB cell to prevent phage proliferation (i.e. restriction/modification systems or abortive infection mechanisms).
Phage adsorption to the LAB surface is the first critical step, and prevention of this event should also be a powerful approach for phage inhibition. However, the genes specifying phage receptor components and the nature of the phage receptors are less understood. Based on the expertise of the five participants in the field of phage biology and molecular biology of mesophilic and thermophilic LAB used for dairy fermentations, we propose to:
1. identify genes coding for phage receptor components of commonly used LAB (Lactococcus lactis, Streptococcus thermophilus, Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. lactis and subsp. bulgaricus) located either in the cell wall or in the cell membrane. Insertion inactivation of the genes in a food-grade approach will result in a set of LAB mutants unable to adsorb phages. Fermentation activites of the mutant strains will be tested with a broad set of different phage types known to occur in the dairy field.
2. identify and characterize the phage receptor components of these LAE strains involved in the primary adsorption step to the cell surface and in the secondary infection step at the cell membrane.
3. to evaluate the fermentation activity of the phage adsorption mutants under industrial conditions. This work item will be facilitated by the participitation of an industrial partner producing LAB starter cultures for the dairy industry.
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.
- natural sciences chemical sciences organic chemistry organic acids
- natural sciences biological sciences microbiology bacteriology
- natural sciences biological sciences microbiology virology
- agricultural sciences animal and dairy science dairy
- engineering and technology industrial biotechnology bioprocessing technologies fermentation
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Coordinator
24103 Kiel
Germany
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