Isolation and Characterization of a Novel Lactic Acid Bacterium for the Production of Lactic Acid

We isolated a novel lactic acid bacterium from a Korean traditional fermented food, soybean paste. The newly isolated strain, dubbed RKY2, grew well on glucose, sucrose, galactose, and fructose, but it could not utilize xylose, starch, or glycerol. When the partially amplified 16S rDNA sequence (772 bp) of the strain RKY2 was compared with 10 reference strains, it was found to be most similar to Lactobacillus pentosus JCM $1588^T$, with 99.74% similarity. There-fore, the strain RKY2 was renamed Lactobacillus sp. RKY2, which has been deposited in the Korean Collection for Type Cultures as KCTC 10353BP. Lactobacillus sp. RKY2 was found to be a homofermentative lactic acid bacterium, because its end-product from glucose metabolism was found to be mainly lactic acid. It could produce more than 90 g/L of lactic acid from MRS medium supplemented with 100 g/L of glucose, with 5.2 g $L^-1$ $h^-1$ of productivity and 0.95 g/g of lactic acid yield.