Probiotic profiling of Leuconostoc species isolated from a traditional fermented cassava product

The various properties of lactic acid bacteria have made them good auxiliary in the manufacturing process in agro food industries and farms. They are widely used as probiotics which can be defined as living microorganisms that have beneficial effects on human health probiotics could replace antibiotic growth promoters in livestock without creating new threats such as that observed with antibiotics. Before their use as probiotics lactic acid bacteria require a perfect knowledge in view to their biochemical and genetic characteristics because it is difficult to differentiate morphologically some Leuconostoc and Lactobacillus strains using morphological characteristics. This study was undertaken in order to evaluate the probiotics potential of Leuconostoc strains isolated from traditional fermented cassava. The results showed that 5 strains of Leuconostoc have antibacterial activity against Staphylococcus aureus (MetiR), Klebsiella pneumoniae (BLSE), Escherichia coli, Salmonella typhimurium and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The molecular identification of species using the conserved region of the 16S rRNA helped distinguish the species Leuconostoc mesenteroides. All these results showed that the studied Leuconostoc strains could be used as potential probiotics for the biopreservation of various foods. Key words: Leuconostoc, antibacterial activity, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), sequencing, probiotics.