Microbial Community Succession and Its Environment Driving Factors During Initial Fermentation of Maotai-Flavor Baijiu.

Fei Hao,Fan Yang,Hai Du,Li Wang,Yuwei Tan,Heyu Wang,Xibin Lv,Liangqiang Chen,Yan Xu

doi:10.3389/fmicb.2021.669201

Abstract

The microbial composition and environmental factors can take a great influence on community succession during the solid-state fermentation (SSF) of Maotai-flavor Baijiu. In this paper, high-throughput sequencing was used to reveal the dominant microorganisms and the evolution process of microbial community structure in the initial fermentation of Maotai-flavor Baijiu. The correlation analysis was carried out for the relationship between physicochemical factors and fermented microbes. The results showed that microorganisms were obviously enriched and the diversity of bacteria and fungi showed a downward trend during the heap fermentation process of Maotai-flavor Baijiu. However, the diversity of fungi in the pit fermentation process increased. Generally, Lactobacillus, Pichia, and Saccharomyces were the dominant microorganisms in the initial fermentation of Maotai-flavor Baijiu. According to the redundancy analysis, we found that reducing sugar was the key driving factor for microbial succession in the heap fermentation, while acidity, alcohol, and temperature were the main driving forces in pit fermentation. This study revealed the microbial succession and its related environmental factors in the initial fermentation of Maotai-flavor Baijiu, which will enrich our knowledge of the mechanism of solid-state liquor fermentation.

Highlights

Baijiu is produced by the solid-state fermentation (SSF) process which involves complex microbiota (Wang et al, 2018a; Guo et al, 2019)
Baijiu fermentation is an open SSF process, in which microorganisms are derived from the environment, and the environmental factors affect the succession of microbial community structure (Guan et al, 2020; Wang et al, 2020)
The traditional Maotai-flavor Baijiu fermentation is processed by typical two-stage fermentation, including heap fermentation and pit fermentation

Summary

Introduction

Baijiu is produced by the solid-state fermentation (SSF) process which involves complex microbiota (Wang et al, 2018a; Guo et al, 2019). The research of Baijiu technology mainly focused on the screening of functional microorganisms, analysis of microbial community structure succession, and the correlation between volatile profiles and microbial communities (Zou et al, 2018; Jin et al, 2019; Song et al, 2019; Wang et al, 2020). These studies revealed the changes of microbial succession in the process of liquor making, the core functional strains for liquor brewing, and their contribution to liquor flavor compounds. That deepens the difficulties to study the microbial community diversity and temporal succession in microbial ecology of Maotai-flavor Baijiu fermentation

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion