Milk fermentation by Lactococcus lactis with modified proteolytic systems to accumulate potentially bio-active peptides

The proteolytic system of lactic acid bacteria has been characterised in detail and numerous modified strains with null or increased specific proteolytic activities have been Constructed or identified among natural strains. Based oil this knowledge, our objective was to ferment milk with modified strains and produce mixtures of peptides with specific features corresponding to potential bio-activities. We used a collection of Lactococcus lactis negative mutants for peptidase activities available in the laboratory to ferment the milk. In particular, we focused our work on mutants lacking either aminopeptidase N, X-prolyl dipeptidyl aminopeptidase or tripeptidase in order to test their ability to form peptides with immunomodulating or antihypertensive activities. At the end of fermentation, supernatants were fractionated by RP-HPLC. Each fraction collected was analysed by Maldi-T of MS and sequencing. We observed that mutants accumulated specific peptides consistent with the specificity of the missing peptidases. Some of the peptides identified present similarities with peptides having immunomodulating or anti-hypertensive effects. One of these was quantified. At the same time, we observed that the inhibition of angiotensin converting enzyme was stronger in supernatants obtained with mutant strains than in Supernatant obtained using the wild-type strain. In conclusion, we showed that in some cases, modifications to the proteolytic system of Lactococcus lactis gave rise to significant differences in the mixtures of peptides produced during milk fermentation. The differences in bio-activity of these peptide mixtures were only partially determined in vitro and evidently need to be demonstrated in vivo. Exploitation of the biodiversity of the proteolytic system of lactic acid bacteria may enable a direct application of this work and undoubtedly a promising means of directly producing natural bio-active peptides in fermented milk products.