I am working on the purification of bacteriocin, when screening for bacteriocin production by agar plug diffusion method, about 25% of isolates were bacteriocin producer but about 10% were gave antimicrobial activity by agar well diffusion method.
Check https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/biochemistry-genetics-and-molecular-biology/bacteriocin
Also check https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3255625/
This is to kill the bacteria that compete with them for food and place.
The nutrient in the medium is limited, as the bacterial count increase and the nutrient will be deficient for this reason bacteria adapts to produce antimicrobial substances like bacteriocin. Bacteriocin will prevent the growth of some other bacteria.
Sometimes bacteriocin encodes in plasmid like colicin. for this reason, after a long growth cycle plasmid curing will cause in deletion of the bacteriocin encoding genes.
Usually beneficial bacteria, which is called flora, produce these bacteriocins, which are natural antibiotics, not only bacteriocins but also organic acids and other natural organic materials that are natural inhibitors used by these bacteria in the mechanisms of competitive exclusion of pathogenic bacteria, where they compete with on the binding sites and on food and inhibit them with these compounds and all this is in the interest of the host. Also, these compounds are of great importance, as modern science has recently tended to use these beneficial bacteria and because of what they produce from these compounds in the process of bio-preservation of food, which on the one hand is safer due to the absence of preservatives or chemicals, and on the other hand, it preserves the organoleptic properties of food, which is more acceptable to the consumer.
Kindly check the following links, they maybe useful:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/pharmacology-toxicology-and-pharmaceutical-science/bacteriocin
https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1516-89132007000300018
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