Establishment of a novel method of screening anti-allergic lactic acid bacteria.

In this study, we attempted to establish a novel method of screening anti-allergic lactic acid bacteria (LAB). We cloned the human histidine decarboxylase (HDC) promoter into the promoter-less pPhi-Yellow-RPL-dest1 vector and established KU812F cells transduced with this vector (pHDCp-Phi-Yellow/KU812F). After adding LAB to these cells, the change in fluorescence intensity was monitored by flow cytometry. After screening, we identified several LAB strains that downregulated HDC promoter activity. Functional analysis of these LAB strains indicated that two LAB strains inhibited histamine release from KU812F cells, indicating that this assay system can be used to screen for anti-allergic LAB in a high-throughput manner.