Abstract
Salting is one of the oldest food preservation techniques. However, salt is also the source of living halophilic microorganisms that may affect human health. In order to determine the microbial communities of commercial salts, an investigation were done using amplicon sequencing approach in four commercial salts: Ethiopian Afdera salt (EAS), Ethiopian rock salt (ERS), Korean Jangpan salt (KJS), and Korean Topan salt (KTS). Using domain-specific primers, a region of the 16S rRNA gene was amplified and sequenced using a Roche 454 instrument. The results indicated that these microbial communities contained 48.22–61.4% Bacteria, 37.72–51.26% Archaea, 0.51–0.86% Eukarya, and 0.005–0.009% unclassified reads. Among bacteria, the communities in these salts were dominated by the phyla Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Actinobacteria, and Firmicutes. Of the archaea, 91.58% belonged to the class Halobacteria, whereas the remaining 7.58, 0.83, and 0.01% were Nanoarchaea, Methanobacteria, and Thermococci, respectively. This comparison of microbial diversity in salts from two countries showed the presence of many archaeal and bacterial genera that occurred in salt samples from one country but not the other. The bacterial genera Enterobacter and Halovibrio were found only in Korean and Ethiopian salts, respectively. This study indicated the occurrence and diversity of halophilic bacteria and archaea in commercial salts that could be important in the gastrointestinal tract after ingestion.
Highlights
Salting is one of the oldest food preservation methods, which is usually regarded as a technique to control microbial activity
We performed amplicon sequencing analyses to survey the microbial content of four commercial salts that were produced by solar evaporation of hypersaline waters and halite mining (Table 1)
Our previous studies on haloarchaeal taxonomy revealed that the haloarchaeal taxa such as Halostella salina (Song et al, 2016), Halapricum salinum (Song et al, 2014), and Halorubrum halophilum (Yim et al, 2014), have at least two different copies of the 16S rRNA gene
Summary
Salting is one of the oldest food preservation methods, which is usually regarded as a technique to control microbial activity. Some studies revealed that salt itself contains a wide range of halophilic organisms, including bacteria and archaea that are unique to these environments (Henriet et al, 2014) as well as salted and fermented foods (Park et al, 2009; Roh et al, 2010). High-throughput microbial community studies demonstrated that diverse bacteria and archaea were found in hypersaline or saline environments such as ancient halite (Schubert et al, 2010), estuarine sediments (Webster et al, 2015), lacustrine sediments (Gugliandolo et al, 2015), saline lakes (Li et al, 2015), saline soil (Walsh et al, 2005), seawater (Bougouffa et al, 2013), and solar salterns (Mutlu and Guven, 2015). The whole microbiota of commercial salts still remains unclear
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