A novel method for rapid detection of class IIa bacteriocin-producing lactic acid bacteria

A method based on colony PCR was developed for rapid screening of class IIa bacteriocin-producing lactic acid bacteria. The principle of the method is to detect the presence of bacteriocin gene by using specific degenerate primers to amplify a 3 kb fragment from bacteriocin structural gene to histidine kinase gene regions. Degenerate primers were designed according to the conserved amino acid sequences (YGNGVXCXXXXCXV and LDNAIE) contained in class IIa bacteriocins. This assay showed agreement with the conventional well-diffusion method. These findings indicate that the method proposed in this study is considerably more rapid and sufficient for screening of class IIa bacteriocin-producing bacterial isolates in environmental samples.