Integrated multi‐omics approaches to understand microbiome assembly in Jiuqu, a mixed‐culture starter

Abstract

The use of Jiuqu as a saccharifying and fermenting starter in the production of fermented foods is a very old biotechnological process that can be traced back to ancient times. Jiuqu harbors a hub of microbial communities, in which prokaryotes and eukaryotes cohabit, interact, and communicate. However, the spontaneous fermentation based on empirical processing hardly guarantees the stable assembly of the microbiome and a standardized quality of Jiuqu. This review describes the state of the art, limitations, and challenges towards the application of traditional and omics-based technology to study the Jiuqu microbiome and highlights the need for integrating meta-omics data. In addition, 4076

Functional microorganisms in Baijiu Daqu: Research progress and fortification strategy for application

“…Daqu is one of the Chinese Baijiu Jiuqus (starters). The main ingredient is raw wheat, supplemented by a percentage of barley and peas (Kang et al, 2022). The raw materials are moistened, grinder, and shaped into blocks and then sent to the incubation room to be naturally inoculated with environmental microorganisms for fermentation, and the finished product is named Daqu because of its shape (Zheng et al, 2011).…”

“…In the Daqu type division, mainly in Daqu fermentation maximum temperature (High-temperature Daqu, Middle-temperature Daqu, Low-temperature Daqu), flavor characteristics (Maotai-flavor Baijiu Daqu, Luzhou-flavor Baijiu Daqu, Fen-flavor Baijiu Daqu, etc. ), shape (Bag Daqu, Brick Daqu), production methods (Mechanical Daqu, Handmade Daqu), functional characteristics (Traditional Daqu, Fortified Daqu) to divide (Zheng et al, 2018;Zuo et al, 2020;Kang et al, 2022;Figure 1A).…”

“…However, the microbiota of Daqu and its brewing environment is complex and diverse, and the traditional dependent culture technology can only obtain 0.1-1.0% of the microorganisms in the environment, which greatly limits the study of microbial community diversity, flavor characteristics and formation mechanism of Chinese Baijiu fermentation (Kang et al, 2022). Therefore, the identification of uncultured microorganisms has become an important subject for the in-depth understanding of Daqu and the Baijiu fermentation mechanism.…”

Non‐gene‐editing microbiome engineering of spontaneous food fermentation microbiota—Limitation control, design control, and integration

“…We placed the terroir element at the base of the yellow pyramid, reflecting its support for the other elements. Terroir determines the phenotype of raw materials, influences the control of craft parameters, and plays a role in the assembly of SFFM (Conacher et al., 2021; Gilbert et al., 2014; Kang et al., 2022; Kelly et al., 2012; Tan et al., 2022). Although terroir is the basis of the fermentation system, its direct contribution to products is usually thought of as a geographical indication endowing products with regional cultural features and global recognition (Lucini et al., 2020).…”

“…Some research has shown that bioreactors with high surface‐area‐to‐volume ratios give a higher product yield than traditional cultures or handmade substrates (Kang et al., 2022; Qian et al., 2019). To incorporate this, functional guilds and initial microbiota could be printed in hydrogels using living‐cell printing technology (He et al., 2022) to better realize species and community coalescence.…”