Resistance to bacteriocin Lcn972 improves oxygen tolerance of Lactococcus lactis IPLA947 without compromising its performance as a dairy starter.

Based on our results, L. lactis R5 can be proposed as a suitable dairy starter with improved survival under oxidative stress and enhanced metabolic traits. The results support the notion that adaptive evolution under cell envelope stress might be useful to generate strain diversity within industrial L. lactis strains.