Cheese Production
L. lactis subsp. lactis (formerly Streptococcus lactis) is used in the early stages for the production of many cheeses, including Brie, Camembert, Cheddar, Colby, Gruyère, Parmesan, and Roquefort. The state Assembly of Wisconsin, also the number one cheese-producing state in the United States, voted in 2010 to name this bacterium as the official state microbe. It would have been the first and only such designation by a state legislature in the nation, however the legislation was not picked up by the Senate.
The use of L. lactis in dairy factories is not without issues. Bacteriophages specific to L. lactis cause significant economic losses each year by preventing the bacteria from fully metabolizing the milk substrate. Several epidemiologic studies showed the phages mainly responsible for these losses are from the species 936, c2, and P335 (all from the family Siphoviridae).
Read more about this topic: Lactococcus Lactis
Famous quotes containing the words cheese and/or production:
“I may be able to spot arrowheads on the desert but a refrigerator is a jungle in which I am easily lost. My wife, however, will unerringly point out that the cheese or the leftover roast is hiding right in front of my eyes. Hundreds of such experiences convince me that men and women often inhabit quite different visual worlds. These are differences which cannot be attributed to variations in visual acuity. Man and women simply have learned to use their eyes in very different ways.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)