Summary

The aim of this study is the isolation, characterization and identification of autochtho-nous lactic acid bacteria (LAB) from artisanal Vlasina raw goat's milk cheese for the selec-tion of potential starter cultures. Soft white Vlasina cheese was manufactured at a house-hold on the Stara Planina Mountain using traditional techniques without starter cultures. One hundred and forty nine LAB isolates were collected from two samples of Vlasina cheese, designated as BGVL2 (5 days old) and BGVL2a (15 days old). The population of LAB in the cheese samples was characterized by phenotype-based assays and presump-tively identified using repetitive element palindromic polymerase chain reaction (rep-PCR) with the primer (GTG)5. Results were confirmed by 16S rDNA sequencing. Among the BGVL2 isolates (56), the most numerous LAB species were Leuconostoc pseudomesenteroides (27) and Lactococcus lactis (26). In 15-day-old BGVL2a (93 isolates), Lactobacillus plantarum (33), Enterococcus durans (26) and Pediococcus pentosaceus (14) were predominant. Lc. lactis ssp. lactis BGVL2-8 showed good acidification ability and the ability to produce antimicro-bial compounds, Lb. plantarum BGVL2a-18 had good proteolytic ability and produced exo-polysaccharides, while BGVL2-29 and BGVL2-63, which belonged to the species Ln. pseu-domesenteroides, utilized citrate and produced diacetyl and acetoin. They appeared to be suitable candidates for inclusion in the starter culture. This study contributed to the un-derstanding of the role of autochthonous LAB in the quality of artisanal cheese and the possibility of using the selected LAB as potential starter cultures for cheese making under controlled conditions