By using degenerate primers designed from the first 19 N-terminal amino acids of Lactobacillus plantarum p-coumaric acid decarboxylase (PDC), a 56-bp fragment was amplified from L. plantarum in PCRs and used as a probe for screening an L. plantarum genomic bank. Of the 2,880 clones in the genomic bank, one was isolated by colony hybridization and contained a 519-bp open reading frame (pdc gene) followed by a putative terminator structure. The pdc gene is expressed on a monocistronic transcriptional unit, which is transcribed from promoter sequences homologous to Lactococcus promoter sequences. No mRNA from pdc and no PDC activity were detected in uninduced cell extracts, indicating that the expression is transcriptionally regulated by p-coumaric acid, which corresponds to an activation factor up to 6,000. The pdc gene was overexpressed constitutively in Escherichia coli, and the recombinant enzyme was purified and characterized.