3. Results and discussion
3.1. The identification results of the LAB strains
Fermented food product quality is certainly related to the composition of food microbiota. If spontaneous fermentations are chosen then the desired properties will be changed by the dominant microorganisms. Furthermore, spontaneous process may result in spoilage or the survival of some pathogens. In industry these reasons have oriented the firms to use starter cultures in order to obtain standard products at each production time (Rodriguez et al., 2009 and Ayhan et al., 2005). One of our aim was to detect appropriate starter strains as many scientific researches focused on selecting potential starter cultures.
In this study, twenty one lactic acid bacteria were isolated from 41 şalgam juice samples and then identified by using 12 different biochemical tests. According to biochemical tests four of these isolates (19.05%) were Leuconostoc mesenteroides, six of them (28.57%) were Lb. plantarum, one of them was Lactobacillus helveticus – Lactobacillus acidophilus, one of them was Lb. plantarum – Lb. acidophilus and finally, one of them was Lactobacillus casei – Lactobacillus paracasei ( Table 2).