Lactic Acid Bacteria: Microbial Metabolism and Expanding Applications

Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) have various applications both in the food industry and within biotechnology. Owing to their fast acidification rate, their flavor-forming capacity and the prolonged shelf-life of their fermented products, LAB have established themselves as excellent platforms for food fermentation. Some LAB are also important members of the human gut microbiota and act as probiotics, which benefit the host by producing functional short-chain fatty acids, anti-microbial peptides and therapeutic proteins or metabolites. The exceptional importance of LAB calls forth tremendous efforts to study their metabolism, molecular biology, genetics and biochemistry in order to increase the health benefits of their fermented products, to better engineer LAB for functional molecules, as well as to elucidate the metabolic interactions between LAB and their consortium. Recently, advances in the tools developed for systems metabolic engineering, synthetic biology and systems biology have significantly improved our understanding of the microbial metabolism of LAB, their metabolic interactions, and to further expanded their applications.

This Research Topic aims to present state-of-the-art research and future directions for LAB metabolism and applications. Specifically, we encourage the submission of reviews, original research, methods, as well as perspective articles focusing on (but not limited to) the following topics:

- Microbial metabolism of LAB
- Development of state-of-the-art tools for engineering LAB
- Metabolic engineering of LAB for valuable chemicals, functional proteins, therapeutic molecules.
- Cell-based catalysis of LAB
- Applications of LAB as starter culture, probiotics and cell factories