Isolation and Identification of Lactobacillus plantarum from Vegetable Samples

Lactobacillus plantarum, a non-pathogenic species of lactic acid bacteria, has considerable industrial and medical interest. It is used as starter culture in food and feed fermentation. For developing new starter culture usually needs identification from natural sources. Many literatures are available for its definite identification. But ambiguous results of phenotypic characterization and application of laborious and expensive molecular approaches has generated the need of a rapid molecular assay. Therefore, a specific PCR assay is described which exploits PCR amplification of conserved gene sequences encoding for plantaricin biosynthesis protein by designed species specific primer pair plnX (F/R). This has generated 228 bp amplicons with test and positive controls. This assay was established by six genotypically identified test strains of vegetable samples, two positive and four negative controls. The described assay could be used for preliminary screening of L. plantarum from large samples before performing a battery of phenotypic and molecular methods.