Overproduction of Lactic Bacterial Enzymes and Bioactive Components

Recent developments in the application of molecular biology to food grade lactic acid bacteria (LAB) have shown that it could be feasible to engineer metabolic pathways to either enhance specific metabolic fluxes or to divert metabolites for the production of different or new end products. This engineering requires detailed knowledge of enzymes involved in metabolism and regulation within the targeted organism but little works have been done in this area. During biochemical and molecular characterisation of lactic bacterial enzymes, some of probiotic Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium species were found to be very useful for food, nutraceutical and pharmaceutical industries. The enzymes are usually intracellular and the yields are very low to be useful for industrial applications. Among many enzymes and proteins of lactic bacteria studied, some of our gene cloning achievements have contributed to overproduction of lactic bacterial enzymes such as peptidases, esterases, lactases, bile salt hydrolases and linoleate isomerases for foods and nutraceuticals.