Abstract
Chowan, dawdim, humao, hamei, khekhrii, and phut are sun-dried starters used for preparation of alcoholic beverages in North East regions of India. We attempted to profile the mycobiome community in these starters by high-throughput sequencing (HTS) method. All fungal populations were found to be restricted to Ascomycota (67–99%), Zygomycota (0.7–29%), Basidiomycota (0.03–7%), and Chytridiomycota (0.0003%). We found 45 core operational taxonomic units (OTUs) which were universally present and were further weighed to 41 genera level and 22 species level taxonomy. A total number of 594 fungal species were detected by HTS including common species (224), unique species (133) and rare-species (237) in samples of starters. Unique species were recorded in phut (40 species), khekhrii (28), hamei (23), dawdim (21), chowan (13), and humao (8), respectively. Most of the fungal families were found to correlate to a type of nutritional mode and growth morphologies of the community, where saprotrophic mode of mold species were more dominant, whereas morphotypes were more dominant in yeast species.
Highlights
Prepared sun-dried cereal-based amylolytic/alcoholic starters, in the form of round/oval/flattened balls of varied sizes for production of mild-alcoholic beverages, are common in South East Asia (Hesseltine, 1983; Steinkraus, 1996; Nout and Aidoo, 2002; Tamang, 2010a)
The present study reveals the mycobiome diversity in the same samples of chowan, dawdim, hamei, humao, khekhrii, and phut by culture-independent method using high-throughput sequencing approach, which permits the analysis of hundreds of nucleotide
We generated 5213436 paired end sequences and were clustered into operational taxonomic units (OTUs) by single linkage clustering with 97% sequence similarity
Summary
Prepared sun-dried cereal-based amylolytic/alcoholic starters, in the form of round/oval/flattened balls of varied sizes for production of mild-alcoholic beverages, are common in South East Asia (Hesseltine, 1983; Steinkraus, 1996; Nout and Aidoo, 2002; Tamang, 2010a). Three types of mixed cultures are traditionally used as starters to convert cereal starch to sugar and to alcohol and organic acids (Hesseltine et al, 1988; Tamang and Fleet, 2009; Tamang, 2010a,b) These are (1): dried starter consisting of consortia of amylase/alcohol producing-yeasts, filamentous molds and bacteria, which are locally called marcha in India, Nepal and Bhutan (Tsuyoshi et al, 2005), chiu/chu/daque in China (Chen et al, 2014; Xu et al, 2017), nuruk in Korea (Jung et al, 2012), ragi in Indonesia (Surono, 2016), loog-pang in Thailand (Limtong et al, 2002), benh men in Vietnam (Dung et al, 2007) and dombea in Cambodia (Ly et al, 2018); (2): mixed culture of molds Aspergillus oryzae and A. sojae in the form of a starter called koji in Japan for making saké, distilled liquor, and several fermented. Application of the amplicon-based high-throughput sequencing has been demonstrated for the monitoring of microbial populations between different strains within a species (Ercolini et al, 2012), and inter- and intra-species diversity within a particular genus or among genera (Yan et al, 2013)
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