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The food industry seeks alternatives to satisfy consumer demands of safe foods with a long shelf-life able to maintain the nutritional and organoleptic quality. The application of antimicrobial compounds-producing protective cultures may provide an additional parameter of processing in order to improve the safety and ensure food quality, keeping or enhancing its sensorial characteristics. In addition, strong evidences suggest that certain probiotic strains can confer resistance against infection with enteric pathogens. Several mechanisms have been proposed to support this phenomenon, including antimicrobial compounds secreted by the probiotics, competitive exclusion, or stimulation of the immune system. Recent research has increasingly demonstrated the role of antimicrobial compounds as protective mechanism against intestinal pathogens and therefore certain strains could have an effect on both the food and the gut. In this aspect, the effects of the combination of different strains keep unknown. The development of multistrain probiotic dairy products with good technological properties and with improved characteristics to those shown by the individual strains, able to act not only as protective cultures in foods, but also as probiotics able to exert a protective action against infections, has gained increased interest.

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Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) are commonly used in the production of fermented and probiotic foods. Development of molecular tools to discriminate the strains of interest from the endogenous microbiota in complex environments like food or gut is of high interest. Green fluorescent protein (GFP)-like chromophores strictly requires molecular oxygen for maturation of fluorescence, which restrict the study of microorganisms in low-oxygen environments. In this work, we have developed a noninvasive cyan-green fluorescent based reporter system for real-time tracking of LAB that is functional under anoxic conditions. The evoglow-Pp1 was cloned downstream from the promoters D-alanyl-D-alanine carboxypeptidase and elongation factor Tu of Lactobacillus reuteri CECT925 using pNZ8048 and downstream of the lactococcal P1 promoter using pT1NX. The classical gfp was also cloned in pT1NX. These recombinant expression vectors were electroporated into Lactococccus, Lactobacillus, and Enterococcus strains with biotechnological and/or probiotic interests to assess and compare their functionality under different conditions of oxygen and pH. The expression was analyzed by imaging and fluorometric methods as well as by flow cytometry. We demonstrate that reporter systems pNZ:TuR-aFP and pT1-aFP are two versatile molecular markers for monitoring LAB in food and fecal environments without the potential problems caused by oxygen and pH limitations, which could be exploited for in vivo studies. Production of the fluorescent protein did not disturb any important physiological properties of the parental strains, such as growth rate, reuterin, or bacteriocin production.

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Lactobacillus salivarius CECT 5713, isolated from human milk, has immunomodulatory, anti-inflammatory and antiinfectious properties, as revealed by several in vitro and in vivo assays, which suggests a strong potential as a probiotic strain. In this work, the relationships between several genetic features of L. salivarius CECT 5713 and the corresponding phenotypes were evaluated. Although it contains a plasmid-encoded bacteriocin cluster, no bacteriocin biosynthesis was observed, possibly due to a 4-bp deletion at the beginning of the histidine kinase determinant abpK. The genome of L. salivarius CECT 5713 harbours two apparently complete prophages of 39.6 and 48 kbp. Upon induction, the 48-kbp prophage became liberated from the bacterial genome, but no DNA replication took place, which resulted in lysis of the cultures but not in phage progeny generation. The strain was sensitive to most antibiotics tested and no transmissible genes potentially involved in antibiotic resistance were detected. Finally, the genome of L. salivarius CECT 5713 contained four ORFs potentially involved in human molecular mimetism. Among them, protein 1230 was considered of particular relevance because of its similarity with dendritic cell-related proteins. Subsequently, in vitro assays revealed the ability of L. salivarius CECT 5713 to stimulate the maturation of immature dendritic cells and to inhibit the in vitro infectivity of HIV-1.