All LAB isolates were tolerant to the NaCl concentration used in
this study (Table 4). For industrial application of LAB as starter
cultures in cheese, these microorganisms must be capable of
tolerating stressful conditions such as acidity, temperature, salt
stress and freeze-drying. To tolerate NaCl, various mechanisms
developed by LAB are described, for example the uptake or synthesis
of a limited number of solutes (Bremer & Kr€amer, 2000).
To separate the LAB isolates in this study according to their
overall characteristics, PCA was carried out based on probiotic
characteristics (Fig. 1). The first seven components accounted for
71.44% of the total variance. Among them, PC1 and PC2 made up
16.26 and 12.702% of the total variance respectively. Probiotic