Wednesday, 21 June 2023, 9.00 – 10.30
In the last decade, the renaissance of the different traditional fermented products attracts the attention of the consumers based on their nutritional and health-promoting beneficial properties. Consumers start to evaluate more critically what they eat and why they eat, taking into consideration that food is not only a pleasure and way of cover nutritional needs, but food can be a major factor for wellbeing and can be a direct link to the general health. The perception of a direct relationship between nutrition and health was proposed a long time ago by Hippocrates; he stated his dream that “One day our food will be a medicine and medicine will be food.”
Antimicrobial proteins (bacteriocins) produced by LAB, starter and adjunct culture, part of the technological process of different fermented food products, were intensively studied. Bacteriocins were originally defined as polypeptides with activity against closely related species and as primary metabolites, expressed via ribosomal machinery of the bacterial cells spontaneously; however, some of them need to be induced. Over the time, with building deeper scientific knowledge on antimicrobial peptides, perspective on role of bacteriocins was extended and nowadays we acknowledge their additional role as pharmaceuticals, key player in quorum sensing and inhibitory properties versus even cancer cells, viruses and multidrug resistant pathogens. However, even if we have built considerable knowledge about fermented food products microbiology, produced bacteriocins and their beneficial properties, this is only a small part of all the enormous treasure that bacteriocins and their producers can offer to consumers. Bacteriocins are an excellent area of investigations, ready to be explored and applied for human wellbeing. Different traditional fermented food products can be considered as a crossroad between nutrition, probiotic concept and medicine, the complex universe, combining sophisticate nutritional food matrixes with well-established and balanced microbial consortium, powerful metabolite machinery of LAB and arsenal of different antimicrobial agents. Bacteriocins produced by LAB from traditional fermented food products can be clearly stated as beneficial and health-promoting metabolites with potential in the realization of Hippocrates’ dream.
All of us we are exploring beneficial properties of the microorganisms and their contributions as probiotics. Bacteriocinogenic properties are only one additional benefits of the probiotic organisms, however, that antimicrobial peptides are more and more acknowledged as mayor contributors for the health promoting benefits of probiotics. Scientific challenges will need to be explore the role and activity of bacteriocins in the intestinal tract, and their potential application of as anti-cancer agents and potent contributors in human health.