L. plantarum is a nonpathogenic, facultative heterofermentive LAB capable of fermenting a large variety of sugar sources. It is also found to grow in a wide range of environments beyond plants, including meat and dairy products, fermented fruits and vegetables, and the gastrointestinal tract of humans and Drosophila fruit flies [Siezen10, Siezen11, Martino16].

Because of the carbohydrate fermentation capabilities, the presence in fermented foods, the general acid-tolerance and susceptibility to antibiotics, L. plantarum strains have been promoted as a probiotic for humans. To aid in the usage of these probiotics, L. plantarum strains have been designated generally recognized as safe (GRAS) by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and have been given the status of qualified presumption of safety (QPS) from the European Food Safety Authorities [Cebeci03, Seddik17, Prete20].

The genetic, metabolic and ecological diversity and versatility, and the interest in its probiotic capability has made L. plantarum a microbe of interest for industrial applications. Although it has been referred to as "a natural metabolic engineer", many synthetic biology 'tools' have been developed to further its industrial potential [Siezen11, Bober18, Mays18, Spangler19, Son20].

The genome used for this PGDB was sequenced from a single colony isolate of L. plantarum strain NCIMB8826 and given the strain designation WCFS1. It was subsequently resequenced using Solexa technology which provided corrections and improved functional predictions of a variety of proteins including oxidoreductases, transporters and transcriptional regulators [Siezen12]. This Pathway/Genome Database (PGDB) was generated from the NCBI RefSeq assemblies for the genome and the three plasmids using the PathoLogic [Karp16, Karp11] component of Pathway Tools software version 25.0 and MetaCyc [Caspi18] version 25.5 on 16-Apr-2021.

Development of this PGDB was supported by BioCyc subscription revenues and by grant GM080746 from the National Institute of Health.