Antimicrobial antagonists against food pathogens: a bacteriocin perspective

• Multiple bacteriocin production by a single strain is a desirable trait.
• Planktonic and sessile cells respond differently to bacteriocins.
• Bioengineering is being used to design bacteriocins for specific applications.
• Genome mining is revealing novel bacteriocins from unexplored niches.
• Bacteriocin production is an important probiotic trait.

Efforts are continuing to find novel bacteriocins with enhanced specificity and potency. Traditional plating techniques are still being used for bacteriocin screening studies, however, the availability of ever more bacterial genome sequences and the use of in silico gene mining tools have revealed novel bacteriocin gene clusters that would otherwise have been overlooked. Furthermore, synthetic biology and bioengineering-based approaches are allowing scientists to harness existing and novel bacteriocin gene clusters through expression in different hosts and by enhancing functionalities. The same principles apply to bacteriocin producing probiotic cultures and their application to control pathogens in the gut. We can expect that the recent developments on bacteriocins from Lactic Acid Bacteria (LAB) described here will contribute greatly to increased commercialisation of bacteriocins in food systems.