Project description:Lactobacillus helveticus is a rod-shaped lactic acid bacterium that is widely used in the manufacture of fermented dairy foods and for production of bioactive peptides from milk proteins. Although L. helveticus is commonly associated with milk environments, phylogenetic studies show it is closely related to an intestinal species, Lactobacillus acidophilus, which has been shown to impart probiotic health benefits to humans. This relationship has fueled a prevailing hypothesis that L. helveticus is a highly specialized derivative of L. acidophilus which has adapted to acidified whey. However, L. helveticus has also been sporadically recovered from non-dairy environments, which argues the species may not be as highly specialized as is widely believed. This study employed genome sequence analysis and comparative genome hybridizations to investigate genomic diversity among L. helveticus strains collected from cheese, whey, and whiskey malt, as well as commercial cultures used in manufacture of cheese or bioactive dairy foods. Results revealed considerable variability in gene content between some L. helveticus strains, and indicated the species should not be viewed as a strict dairy-niche specialist. In addition, comparative genomic analyses provided new insight on several industrially and ecologically important attributes of L. helveticus that may facilitate commercial strain selection.
2013-08-16 | GSE23660 | GEO
Project description:Anaerobic digestion of whey permeate
Project description:The intra sub-species diversity of six strains of Lactococcus lactis subsp. lactis was investigated at the genomic level and in terms of phenotypic and transcriptomic profiles in UF-cheese model. Six strains were isolated from various sources, but all are exhibiting a dairy phenotype. Our results showed that, the six strains exhibited small phenotypic differences since similar behaviour in terms of growth was obtained during cheese ripening while only different acidification capability was detected. Even if all strains displayed high genomic similarities, sharing a high core genome of almost two thousands genes, the expression of this core genome directly in the cheese matrix revealed major strain-specific differences. This strains with the same dairy origin.
