Fermented foods may be important ve

Fermented foods may be important vehicles for enormous amounts of living bacteria to enter human body. These bacteria may carry transferable ARs which could be transferred to commensal or pathogenic bacteria (Mathur & Singh, 2005). Although lactic acid bacteria (LAB) have been widely used in the production of fer- mented foods for a long history (Leroy & De Vuyst, 2004) and were generally recognized as safe, some of them showed intrinsic or acquired AR (Levy, 1997). Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate the AR of LAB in different fermented foods.Chinese fermented foods have been consumed for centuries, but there is little information on AR of LAB colonizing these products. Here we have studied the resistance of LAB in two categories of Chinese fermented food (pickles and fermented pork sausages) to 7 clinically important antibiotics, chloramphenicol (Cam), kanamycin (Kan), tetracycline (Tet), ciprofloxacin (Cip), ampicillin (Amp), clin- damicin (Cli) and erythromycin (Ery). This study would be very useful for safety evaluation of LAB strains in Chinese fermented food.