Lactobacillus plantarum is a bacteria that is commonly found in fermented foods, and therefore often naturally inhabits the digestive tract of humans. It is hypothesized that these bacteria can be used to facilitate improvements in gut health. Quorum sensing (QS), a mechanism used by L. plantarum, is responsible for controlling the production of phenotypes that could be potentially beneficial to the host of the bacteria. In order for this to be possible, QS has been studied through colorimetric enzyme assays using a mutant strain of L. plantarum. The mutant strain contains a genetically engineered plasmid with the same promoter as the QS operon (lamBDCA) upstream of gusA, the gene encoding for the production of β-glucuronidase. These assays have not only confirmed that the lamBDCA operon is responsible for QS, but that QS is responsive to various stimuli including cell count, substrate concentration, and peptide incubation length. In the future, more work will be done towards developing a quorum sensing knockout strain in particular in order to gain further understanding of QS in L. plantarum, and possibly enhance it through dosing the bacteria with varying derivatives of the signaling peptide, LamD558.

Assessing quorum sensing in a mutant strain of Lactobacillus plantarum through β-glucuronidase assays

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