Lactobacillus acidophillus

Well, the name of acidophilus has no longer sounded strange for us; there are many types of fermented dairy products that use L. acidophilus. The most familiar to us are milk and yogurt product - Yakult and Vitagen; and the Korean fermentative vegetables – Kimch. It has been long suggested that L. acidophilus is a beneficial or so-called "friendly" bacteria for human, animal and plant health.

I trusted in Yakult, because it really showed the beneficial effect to me. There was a time it worked in my auntie intestinal disturbance, where my auntie having a bad acute diarrhea.

A bottle of Yakult 2 times a day really helps rapidly in recovering the intestinal digestibility function. Within 6 hours, my auntie’s diarrhea problem disappeared. Here, I just want to give a credit to Yakult and his founder - Dr. Shirota. And the truth is the lactobacillus strain in Yakult was named by his name – Lactobacillus Shirota.


My experiment

My experiment of culturing lactobacillus acidophillus serum

In this experiment, L. acidophilus was solely cultured in milk: culture of these bacteria alone in milk is simple and also the bacteria in commercial fermented milk and commercial probiotics may not be alive and/or the number of live bacteria may be lower than the products label

L. acidophilus was cultured in sterile milk. For sterilization, low fat milk was heated to 120°C for 20 minutes, cooled to 37°C and 2 percent of the L. acidophilus starter was added and incubated at 37 to 40°C for 18 hours. After incubation, the product was stored at 15°c until use. On the average, the fermented milk contained 2×108 cfu g-1 L. acidophilus.

I drink the fermented milk to treat my indigestion, it works well.:) Somehow, i used the residue to make plant soil inoculant! Effective!!


Morphologic and biochemistry (wikipedia)
L. acidophilus is a member of one of the eight main genera of lactic acid bacteria. Each genus and species have different characteristics but they are generally chained cocci or rod shaped gram positive , nonmotile, nonsporulating bacteria that produce lactic acid as a major or sole product of fermentative metabolism and use lactose as their main source of carbon to produce energy. L. acidophilus grows in or without the presence of oxygen, is able to live in highly acidic environments of pH 4-5 or lower and is characterised as a homofermentative ie produces lactic acid as its sole product.

Reproduction
Lactobacillus acidophilus reproduces by the process of binary fission. Binary fission is the form of asexual reproduction in single-celled organisms by which one cell divides into two cells of the same size, used by most prokaryotes. Asexual reproduction is the division of one cell into two cells.