Abstract
Many traditionally fermented milk products such as mabisi involve spontaneous fermentation, which can result in bacterial community composition variation due to selection pressure. The aim of this study was to determine the composition of bacterial communities in the different types of mabisi produced across Zambia and identify the factors that influence their composition. Samples of mabisi were collected across the country, and analyzed for pH and bacterial communities using 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing. We found that the bacterial community composition was dominated by members of two phyla, i.e., Firmicutes and Proteobacteria, from which the top 10 most abundant genera were Lactococcus, Lactobacillus, Streptococcus, Enterobacter, Citrobacter, Klebsiella, Kluyvera, Buttiauxella, Aeromonas, and Acinetobacter. The most dominant genus was Lactococcus, which was present in all types of mabisi produced from all regions. The mabisi products from traditional mabisi production regions (TMPRs) were dominated by lactic acid bacteria (LAB) whereas products from non-TMPRs were dominated by non-LAB species. Tonga mabisi, the most popular type of mabisi produced in non-TMPRs, had the most complex and diverse bacterial community composition compared to the other types, which included barotse, backslopping, creamy, and thick-tonga mabisi. Other factors that influenced bacterial community composition were geographical location, fermentation duration and pH while the type of fermentation container and producer did not. This study provides new insights that can be applied in starter culture development as well as microbial functionality studies.
Highlights
A wide variety of ecosystems exist in nature that are dominated by microbial communities
The mabisi samples were analyzed for physicochemical properties: pH and titratable acidity (TTA), and for bacterial community composition using 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing
The results show that mabisi is composed of bacteria from mainly two phyla (Firmicutes and Proteobacteria) with the most dominant lactic acid bacteria (LAB) genera being Lactococcus, Lactobacillus, and Streptococcus and the non-LAB dominated by Enterobacter, Aeromonas, and Klebsiella (Figure 4)
Summary
A wide variety of ecosystems exist in nature that are dominated by microbial communities. It has been observed that similar systems harbor similar communities in terms of species diversity and that this is driven by selection due to both biotic and abiotic factors, a process that has been named “species sorting” (Langenheder and Székely, 2011; Székely and Langenheder, 2014) While this process is widely acknowledged, little experimental work exists that addresses how selection can shape species communities. These include microbial communities in the soil, human gut as Composition of Natural Bacterial Communities in Mabisi well as fermented foods (de Vries and Griffiths, 2018; Rowland et al, 2018; Anal, 2019). To gain more insights into such products and to understand, if variation in production method or geographical location may impose a selective pressure leading to variations in microbial composition, we took mabisi as a case study
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