New insight into biogenic amines: towards solution and biotechnological applications

Abstract

[Background] Biogenic amines (BA) are low molecular weight nitrogenous compounds mainly formed by the microbial decarboxylation of amino acids. The primary relevance of BA is that the consumption of foods or beverages containing high concentration of BA may cause food intoxication. Dairy products are among the foods likely to contain the highest concentrations of BA, being lactic acid bacteria the main BA-producers.. Objectives Increase our knowledge on BA synthesis in order to adopt strategies for surveillance and prevention of BA accumulation in foods and towards the development of new biotechnological tools.

[Methods] Strategies to reduce the BA content in fermented products: - Avoid the presence of bacteria synthesizing BA through the food chain. The identification of BA gene clusters has allowed the design of molecular methods to identify and quantify the presence of BA producers in cheese samples. - Identify key factors which favor BA accumulation. Different physicochemical and technological factors have been studied in order to determine their impact on BA accumulation either affecting bacterial growth or BA gene expression. - Recently, the use of biogenic amine-degrading microorganisms has been proposed. It is necessary to identify and select highly competitive adjunct cultures capable of in situ reduce the content of BA during the elaboration of fermented products. Beside of this, understand the transcriptional regulation of BA synthesis clusters offer opportunities for the development of new expression vectors.

[Conclusions] The study of BA synthesis, is needed to propose new strategies to avoid BA accumulation in foods and can be used for the development of new biotechnological tools,