Design of Lactic Acid Bacteria Aiming at Probiotic Culture and Molecular Typing for Phyogenetic Identification

Probiotics용 유산균의 Design과 Molecular Typing에 의한 동정법

Over decades of work, the probiotic research has grown rapidly with a number of new cultures, which is claimed a variety of benefit. However, many of the specific effects attributed to the ingestion of probiotics remain convoluted and scientifically unsubstantiated. Accordingly, the scientific community faces a greater challenge and must objectively seek cause and effect relationships for many potential and currently investigated probiotic species. Rational selection and design of probiotics remains an important challenge and will require a solid information about the physiology and genetics of candidate strains relevant to their intestinal roles, functional activities, and interaction of with other resident micro flora. As far as beneficial culture of lactic acid bacteria (LAB) is concerned, simple, cost-effective, and exact identification of candidate strains is of foremost importance among others. Until recently, the relatedness of bacterial isolates has been determined sorely by testing for one or several phenotyphic markers, using methods such as serotyping, phage-typing, biotyping, and so forth. However, there are problems in the use of many of these phenotype-based methods. In contrast, some of newer molecular typing methods involving the analysis of DNA offer many advantages over traditional techniques. These DNA-based methods have the greater discriminatory power than that of phenotypic procedures. This review focuses on the importance and the basis of molecular typing methods along with some considerations on de-sign and selection of probiotic culture for human consumption.