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Aspartate biosynthesis is essential for the growth of Streptococcus thermophilus in milk, and aspartate availability modulates the level of urease activity.

ABSTRACT: We investigated the carbon dioxide metabolism of Streptococcus thermophilus, evaluating the phenotype of a phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase-negative mutant obtained by replacement of a functional ppc gene with a deleted and inactive version, Deltappc. The growth of the mutant was compared to that of the parent strain in a chemically defined medium and in milk, supplemented or not with L-aspartic acid, the final product of the metabolic pathway governed by phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase. It was concluded that aspartate present in milk is not sufficient for the growth of S. thermophilus. As a consequence, phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase activity was considered fundamental for the biosynthesis of L-aspartic acid in S. thermophilus metabolism. This enzymatic activity is therefore essential for growth of S. thermophilus in milk even if S. thermophilus was cultured in association with proteinase-positive Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus. It was furthermore observed that the supplementation of milk with aspartate significantly affected the level of urease activity. Further experiments, carried out with a p(ureI)-gusA recombinant strain, revealed that expression of the urease operon was sensitive to the aspartate concentration in milk and to the cell availability of glutamate, glutamine, and ammonium ions.

SUBMITTER: Arioli S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2074928 | biostudies-literature | 2007 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Aspartate biosynthesis is essential for the growth of Streptococcus thermophilus in milk, and aspartate availability modulates the level of urease activity.

Arioli Stefania S Monnet Christophe C Guglielmetti Simone S Parini Carlo C De Noni Ivano I Hogenboom Johannes J Halami Prakash M PM Mora Diego D

Applied and environmental microbiology 20070727 18

We investigated the carbon dioxide metabolism of Streptococcus thermophilus, evaluating the phenotype of a phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase-negative mutant obtained by replacement of a functional ppc gene with a deleted and inactive version, Deltappc. The growth of the mutant was compared to that of the parent strain in a chemically defined medium and in milk, supplemented or not with L-aspartic acid, the final product of the metabolic pathway governed by phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase. It was c ...[more]

PMID: 17660309

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Project description:Streptococcus thermophilus plays important roles in the dairy industry and is widely used as a dairy starter in the production of fermented dairy products. The genomes of S. thermophilus strains CS5, CS9, CS18, and CS20 from fermented milk in China were sequenced and used for biodiversity analysis. In the present study, the phylogenetic analysis of all 34 S. thermophilus genomes publicly available including these four strains reveals that the phylogenetic reconstruction does not match geographic distribution as strains isolated from the same continent are not even clustered on the nearby branches. The core and variable genes were also identified, which vary among strains from 0 to 202. CS9 strain contained 127 unique genes from a variety of distantly related species. It was speculated that CS9 had undergone horizontal gene transfer (HGT) during the long evolutionary process. The safety evaluation of these four strains indicated that none of them contains antibiotic resistance genes and that they are all sensitive to multiple antibiotics. In addition, the strains do not contain any pathogenic virulence factors or plasmids and thus can be considered safe. Furthermore, these strains were investigated in terms of their technological properties including milk acidification, exopolysaccharide (EPS) and ?-aminobutyric acid (GABA) production, and in vitro survival capacity in the gastrointestinal tract. CS9 possesses a special eps gene cluster containing significant traces of HGT, while the eps gene clusters of CS5, CS18, and CS20 are almost the same. The monosaccharide compositional analysis indicated that crude EPS-CS5, EPS-CS9, EPS-CS18, and EPS-CS20 contain similar monosaccharide compositions with different ratios. Furthermore, CS9 was one of a few GABA-producing strains that could ferment glutamate to produce GABA, which is beneficial for improving the acid tolerance of the strain. CS18 has the most potential for the production of fermented food among these four strains because of its fast growth rate, rapid acidifying capacity, and stronger acid and bile salt resistance capacity. This study focused on the genome analysis of the four new S. thermophilus strains to investigate the diversity of strains and provides a reference for selecting excellent strains by use of the genome data.

Dataset Information

Aspartate biosynthesis is essential for the growth of Streptococcus thermophilus in milk, and aspartate availability modulates the level of urease activity.

Publications

Aspartate biosynthesis is essential for the growth of Streptococcus thermophilus in milk, and aspartate availability modulates the level of urease activity.

Similar Datasets

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