Altogether, these works will contribute to the development and the improvement of new food-grade systems for L. lactis [43] and should lead, in a near future, to the construction of lactococcal strains dedicated to high-level production of proteins of interest. The GRAS status of L. lactis and LAB in general, is a clear advantage for their use in production and secretion of therapeutic or vaccinal proteins. Detection and characterization of horizontal transfers in prokaryotes using genomic signature Horizontal DNA transfer is an important factor of evolution and participates in biological diversity. Unfortunately, the location and length of horizontal transfers (HTs) are known for very few species. The usage of short oligonucleotides in a sequence (the so-called genomic signature) has been shown to be species-specific even in DNA fragments as short as 1 kb. The genomic signature is therefore proposed as a tool to detect HTs. Since DNA transfers originate from species with a signature different from those of the recipient species, the analysis of local variations of signature along recipient genome may allow for detecting exogenous DNA. The strategy consists in (i) scanning the genome with a sliding window, and calculating the corresponding local signature (ii) evaluating its deviation from the signature of the whole genome and (iii) looking for similar signatures in a database of genomic signatures. A total of 22 prokaryote genomes are analyzed in this way. It has been observed that atypical regions make up ∼6% of each genome on the average. Most of the claimed HTs as well as new ones are detected. The origin of putative DNA transfers is looked for among ∼12 000 species. Donor species are proposed and sometimes strongly suggested, considering similarity of signatures. Among the species studied, Bacillus subtilis, Haemophilus Influenzae and Escherichia coli are investigated by many authors and give the opportunity to perform a thorough comparison of most of the bioinformatics methods used to detect HTs. It is now widely admitted that actual genomes have a common ancestor (LUCA, Last Universal Common Ancestor). Their current diversity results from events that have modified genomes during evolution. While some of these events happen at the nucleotide level (point mutation, indel of few nucleotides), others [strand inversion, duplications, repetitions, transpositions and horizontal transfers (HTs)] may concern significant parts of the genome. It has been postulated that HTs (exchange of genetic material between two different species) were very frequent during the first stages of evolution and are essentially subsisting nowadays in prokaryotes (1) (2) (3) (4) . As a consequence, the detection of HTs appears crucial to the understanding of the evolutionary processes and to the qualitative and quantitative evaluation of exchange rate between species (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) .