Proteomics: a tool for understanding lactic acid bacteria adaptation to stressful environments

Abstract

The rapid expansion of proteomics built upon the available bacterial genome sequences has provided new approaches for bacterial functional genomics. In combination with transcriptional profi ling expression, proteomics provides access to interesting candidate genes and proteins that can be further characterized by traditional, physiological and biochemical, and genetic analyses. The action of multiple gene sets can now be revealed by the combined technologies of genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics, which constitute valuable tools to understand these complex phenomena. Insights on different proteomic aspects from theoretical and technical topics up to applied microbial case studies are described in this chapter. Recent developments related to bacterial adaptation to the environment and the defi nitions of technological determinants at the proteome level for economically important lactic acid bacteria, involved mainly in food fermentation, are discussed.