Maximal specific growth rates of the three lactic acid bacteria and their ldh deletions.

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SysMO is a European transnational funding and research initiative on "Systems Biology of Microorganisms".

The goal pursued by SysMO was to record and describe the dynamic molecular processes going on in unicellular microorganisms in a comprehensive way and to present these processes in the form of computerized mathematical models.

Systems biology will raise biomedical and biotechnological research to a new quality level and contribute markedly to progress in understanding. Pooling European research ...

Comparative Systems Biology: Lactic Acid Bacteria

Challenge: Comparative analyses, as demonstrated by comparative genomics and bioinformatics, are extremely powerful for (i) transfer of information from (experimentally) well-studied organisms to the other organisms, and (ii) when coupled to functional and phenotypic information, insight in the relative importance of components to the observed differences and simalities. The central principle of this proposal is that important aspects of the functional differences between organisms derive not ...

Lactic acid bacteria generally use homolactic fermentation for generation of ATP. Here we studied the role of the lactate dehydrogenase enzyme on the general physiology of the three lactic acid bacteria Lactococcus lactis, Enterococcus faecalis and Streptococcus pyogenes. Surprisingly deletion of the ldh genes hardly affected the growth rate in chemically defined medium, however growth rate was affected in rich medium. Furthermore, deletion of ldh affected the ability for utilization of various ...

L. lactis, E. faecalis and S. pyogenes are referred to as LAB because of the fact that in the presence of glucose lactate is produced as the main fermentation product . This metabolic pathway is relatively inefficient, since only 2 ATP are generated from one glucose molecule. All three LAB possess the genetic make up for mixed acid fermentation, a more effective way of fermentation generating 3 ATP per molecule of glucose. All three genomes reveal (at least) two genes encoding a lactate dehydrogenase ...