Abstract
At present, wine is generally produced using Saccharomyces yeast followed by Oenococus bacteria to complete malolactic fermentation. This method has some unsolved problems, such as the management of highly acidic musts and the production of potentially toxic products including biogenic amines and ethyl carbamate. Here we explore the potential of the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe to solve these problems. We characterise an extensive worldwide collection of S. pombe strains according to classic biochemical parameters of oenological interest. We identify three genetically different S. pombe strains that appear suitable for winemaking. These strains compare favourably to standard Saccharomyces cerevisiae winemaking strains, in that they perform effective malic acid deacidification and significantly reduce levels of biogenic amines and ethyl carbamate precursors without the need for any secondary bacterial malolactic fermentation. These findings indicate that the use of certain S. pombe strains could be advantageous for winemaking in regions where malic acid is problematic, and these strains also show superior performance with respect to food safety.
Highlights
Several research teams are studying the winemaking potential of non-Saccharomyces yeast strains [1]
Schizosaccharomyces pombe possesses several remarkable metabolic properties that may be useful in modern quality winemaking [2,5,6], including a malic dehydrogenase activity, high autolytic polysaccharides release [7], ability of gluconic acid reduction [8,9,10,11], urease activity [12,13], elevated production of pyruvic acid and colour improvement [14,15], as well as low production of biogenic amines and ethyl carbamate [6,16]
Starter cultures were grown from 100 μL of each yeast suspension, cultivated in 5 mL volumes of YEPD at 25°C for 24 h. This procedure was performed in triplicate before the final inoculation of 1 mL in the fermentative medium. 1 mL (108 CFU/mL) of these starters cultures were inoculated into tubes containing 9 ml of sterilised concentrated must (Dream Fruits S.A., Quero, Toledo, Spain), which was diluted to 212 g/L glucose + fructose and enriched with 4 g/L malic acid (Panreac, Barcelona, Spain) to simulate acidic musts where the use of S. pombe is more recommended in order to increase wine quality [3,5]
Summary
Several research teams are studying the winemaking potential of non-Saccharomyces yeast strains [1]. Schizosaccharomyces strains are commonly isolated from wines suffering from strong organoleptic and chemical deviations including the appearance of acetic acid, acetaldehyde, acetoin and ethyl acetate [17,18,19,20,21] These undesirable properties of the commonly-used strains have been assumed to be general properties of the species, and only one commercial strain of S. pombe is currently available on the market [22]. The exploration of the winemaking properties of other S. pombe strains has generally been overlooked This omission partly reflects the absence of any specific processes to select strains that are appropriate for winemaking [5], and difficulties with isolating S. pombe from environmental samples [23]. Guided by a recent analysis of genetic and phenotypic diversity of 161 S. pombe strains [24], we can conduct a more extensive survey of the utility of this species for winemaking
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