New approaches to estimate microbial diversity of alcoholic fermentation

Identifier:  TDX:2263

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX2263

Authors:  Wang, Chunxiao

Abstract:
Alcoholic fermentation is driven by complex microbial community, where wine yeasts play an important role. In recent years, there has been growing interest to enhance wine complexity by controlled fermentations using not only S. cerevisiae but also together with some selected non-Saccharomyces yeast strains. Research on yeast viability and interaction has a fundamental role to understand the diversity of yeast in mixed fermentations. In this thesis, culture-independent techniques were developed and applied for direct wine sample analysis including massive sequencing, fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) combined with microscopy and flow cytometry, RT-qPCR and EMA-DGGE. These culture-independent techniques enable fast identification and/or quantification of different wine yeasts. These techniques have been used during spontaneous fermentation in Priorat region, and H. uvarum and Starm. bacillaris where the two main non-Saccharomyces yeast species detected. H. uvarum or Starm. bacillaris gradually lost their culturability when musts were inoculated with S. cerevisiae, but quantifiable yeast cells existed in viable but non-culturable state. The culturability loss of non-Saccharomyces was mainly induced by some metabolites secreted from S. cerevisiae, but changes in other main metabolites also had some effect. This interaction of non-Saccharomyces yeast with S. cerevisiae showed the specificity of species and strains.