TITLE:
Current Limitations and Challenges with Lactic Acid Bacteria: A Review
AUTHORS:
Saeed A. Hayek, Salam A. Ibrahim
KEYWORDS:
Lactic Acid Bacteria; Metabolic Activity; Nutritional Requirements; Limitations; Challenges
JOURNAL NAME:
Food and Nutrition Sciences,
Vol.4 No.11A,
November
27,
2013
ABSTRACT: Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) play a
critical role in food, agricultural, and clinical applications. The fast
growing characteristics of LAB and their metabolic activity have been the key
in most applications including food production, agricultural industry, and
probiotics. However,
the biochemical and biophysical environments have significant effect on the
growth and metabolic activity of LAB. While the biochemical conditions are most
likely established, controlling and optimizing of biochemical conditions have
many limitations and challenges. In addition to selecting the right strain,
desirable metabolic processes required optimizing and controlling the available
nutrients including sugars, peptides, free amino acids, minerals, and vitamins
in addition to buffering agents. Thus, much of research was conducted to understand the impact of available nutrients on the growth and
metabolic activities of
LAB. However, only a
few nutritional parameters could be controlled at a time while holding other
parameters constant. The nutritional parameters may also interact with each
other resulting in faulty results. Characteristics of LAB such as
fastidiousness in their nutritional requirements, ability to produce acid and
antimicrobial compounds, and variations in the nutritional requirements among
strains have added additional limitations and challenges in this regard. Thus,
chemically defined media (CDM) were suggested to deal with different
limitations and challenges. However, due to differences in growth conditions,
results obtained in CDM may face some obstacles when it comes to industrial applications. Thus, this paper aimed to review the recent data in
regard to the role of the nutritional requirements of LAB in optimizing and
controlling metabolic activities and to discuss the associated limitations and
challenges.