Abstract
Traditional cheeses harbour complex microbial consortia that play an important role in shaping typical sensorial properties. However, the microbial metabolism is considered difficult to control. Microbial community succession and the related gene expression were analysed during ripening of a traditional Italian cheese, identifying parameters that could be modified to accelerate ripening. Afterwards, we modulated ripening conditions and observed consistent changes in microbial community structure and function. We provide concrete evidence of the essential contribution of non-starter lactic acid bacteria in ripening-related activities. An increase in the ripening temperature promoted the expression of genes related to proteolysis, lipolysis and amino acid/lipid catabolism and significantly increases the cheese maturation rate. Moreover, temperature-promoted microbial metabolisms were consistent with the metabolomic profiles of proteins and volatile organic compounds in the cheese. The results clearly indicate how processing-driven microbiome responses can be modulated in order to optimize production efficiency and product quality.
Highlights
Fermented food microbial communities are not so complex as those of other natural environments and may be a replicable and tractable system to study the dynamics of microbial assembly and how they may be manipulated by abiotic factors[18]
We identified which bacterial activities/pathways were highly expressed during production and ripening of a pasta-filata cheese, which provided the parameters necessary to understand how to accelerate ripening
non-starter LAB (NSLAB) are known as proteolytic[21,22,23], and the adjunct of selected cultures was shown to increase proteolysis levels[8,24,25], suggesting they may play a key role during cheese ripening
Summary
Fermented food microbial communities are not so complex as those of other natural environments and may be a replicable and tractable system to study the dynamics of microbial assembly and how they may be manipulated by abiotic factors[18]. Longitudinal characterisation of the microbial community structure and gene expression was performed during ripening of the traditional Italian Caciocavallo Silano cheese. This is a typical medium-ripened pasta-filata cheese produced with the addition of NWC as natural starter. We set up a second experiment, in which the ripening conditions were modulated, and consistent changes in microbial community structure and function were observed. We reveal how increasing ripening temperature affects microbial metabolism, which significantly increases the cheese maturation rate
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