Increasing concerns about food safety has lead to an increase in the importance of methods to identify food components. In yogurt with live cultures, it is possible to find several types of bacteria. One popular commercial brand claims to use a specific strand of Bifidobacterium animalis, which is a strain of Gram positive bacteria. The purpose of this experiment was to extract DNA from the bacteria in this brand of yogurt and attempt to identify it as DN-173010 strain I-2494, a particular strain of Bifidobacterium animalis, subspecies lactis.  As a control, DNA extracted from yogurt was compared with human and Micrococcus luteus DNA. The DNA from each sample was extracted using a QuiAmp kit and amplified with PCR using known primers for the specific B. animalis strain. The amplified DNA was separated and visualized using gel electrophoresis. Future work could include comparisons of the bacteria in different brands of yogurt.

Extraction and identification of Bifidobacterium animalis from commercially available yogurt using polymerase chain reaction

245th National Meeting (2013)

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