Genomics Technologies for Enhanced Understanding of Robustness of LAB Starter Cultures

Abstract

During production and application, starter culture strains encounter several stresses. To ensure an adequate contribution to the fermentation process, starter culture strains should remain viable, justifying the increasing industrial efforts to unravel robustness characteristics of LAB starter culture strains. Nowadays, large numbers of genome sequences are publicly available, which enables the employment of several genomics technologies to increase our understanding of robustness. This aids the improvement of currently applied LAB starter culture strains and supports the industrial application of novel strains with specific desirable traits but currently inadequate robustness characteristics. This chapter explores genomics technologies for enhanced understanding of robustness of LAB starter cultures.