Construção de cepas de Salmonella bioluminescentes para utilização em microbiologia de alimentos.

Abstract

Advances in genetic engineering allow different bacterial species that are normally non-luminescent can be developed to become bioluminescent organisms. Nowadays, living microorganisms such as Salmonella spp. are genetically engineered to produce this measurable signal. Many studies have been using the gene lux to modify micro-organisms in other to produce visible light. Besides, the use of the complete luxCDABE cassette allows the bioluminescence can be expressed continuously, without addition of exogenous substrates. Thus, bioluminescent bioreporter bacteria remain entirely self-sufficient in its ability to produce visible light. Moreover, an important advantage is that the bioluminescence measurements using bioreporter bacteria are not invasive and destructive to the cell, and also provide realtime results, which allows the opportunity to employ light emission with great success in several applications in Food Microbiology, as evaluating the antimicrobial efficacy to inactivate pathogens. Therefore, the objective of this study was to construct bioreporter bioluminescent strains of Salmonella and use them to evaluate the microbial resitant against natural antimicrobial compounds, as well as to investigate Lux protein expression and other proteins in different strains of recombinant bacteria using a light-scattering sensor.