Articles of Significant Interest Selected from This Issue by the Editors

摘要

The study of the microbial ecology of foods has dramatically changed, and next-generation sequencing technologies will play a fundamental role in achieving a thorough description of the microbiotas of foods. D. Ercolini (p. 31483155)describes the workflow of possible applications of culture-independent high-throughput sequencing to food matrices. Technical issues and perspectives are discussed; in addition, the decision-making process leading to the best choice of working conditions to fulfill the specific needs of food research is outlined. Lactobacillus casei is a probiotic bacterium commonly found in the gut microbiota. Here, Revilla-Guarinos and colleagues (p. 31603170)show that two related two-component systems encoded by this organism (TCS09 and TCS12) are involved in the response to antimicrobial peptides. These TCSs and their cognate ABC transporters (ABC09 and ABC12, respectively) constitute functional units. TCS09/ABC09 regulates the expression of ABC09 in response to nisin, while TCS12/ABC12 controls cell envelope properties via the dlt operon and the mprF gene.