Screening for biogenic amines production by lactobacillus species and development of functional food, tea curd

Abstract

Biogenic amines (BA) are substances with one or more than one amine groups.BA is organic, basic nitrogenous compounds of low molecular weight. Biogenic amines (BA) are natural toxins. Removal of the á-carboxyl group from an amino acid leads to the corresponding biogenic amine. BA generally occurs in many different kinds of food, such as fishery products, cheese, wine, beer, dry sausages and other fermented foods like curd and idli batter. Functional food is a food, where new ingredients or more of existing ingredients have been added to a food and the new product has an additional function which relate to health-promotion or disease prevention. Potential of functional foods are to mitigate disease, promote health and reduce health care costs. Screening of non-biogenic amine producing LAB from OMFED and homemade curd was done using decarboxylase media. The bacteria having decarboxylase activity gave purple zone due to production of basic amines. Out of five strains only two were found to produce biogenic amines while the other three gave negative result. Those which did not produce biogenic amines are then utilized to prepare green and black tea curds. These curds contain health enhancing compounds such as catechins and flavonoids from tea and also the probiotic LAB strains helpful in many ways. All the three negative strains showed acid tolerance upto pH 3 while they could not survive in pH lower than that. Hence they can be successfully used in curd production as probiotic bacteria since they can tolerate the acidic pH of the upper part of GIT.