A preliminary metagenomic study of puer tea during pile fermentation

Abstract

The dominant microbes of puer tea fermentation were bacteria in the present study, and yeasts rather than moulds accounted for the overwhelming majority of Eukaryota. The analysis of functional genes and metabolic pathways will be helpful for further study of the mechanism of puer tea fermentation at molecular level.

Insights into the microbial diversity and community dynamics of Chinese traditional fermented foods from using high-throughput sequencing approaches

“…Similarly, Jiang et al (2012) compared microbial communities from two different stages during the pile-fermentation of Pu-erh tea using metatranscriptomic analysis and found that Aspergillus niger was the overwhelmingly predominant species at both stages. In contrast, a preliminary metagenomic study of Pu-erh tea during pile fermentation by Lyu et al (2013) showed a significantly lower percentage of eukaryota by metagenomic analysis, indicating the dominant role of bacteria in the whole piling fermentation process. Furthermore, yeasts rather than molds accounted for the overwhelming majority of eukaryota.…”

“…Microbiota has a significant influence on the quality of Pu-erh tea, especially during the wet piling. Various kinds of bio-techniques including DGGE (Tian et al, 2013;Yang et al, 2013), pyrosequencing (Lyu et al, 2013), metatranscriptomics (Jiang et al, 2012), metagenomics and metaproteomics (Zhao et al, 2015) have been used to investigate the microbial composition during the piling process. However, the microbiological profiles of Pu-erh tea are not well understood.…”

“…However, the microbiological profiles of Pu-erh tea are not well understood. There is no doubt that bacteria and fungi cooperate in the piling fermentation, but no consensus on the microbial composition or on which group plays the dominant role in the fermentation process has been reached (Jiang et al, 2012;Lyu et al, 2013). An integrated metagenomics and metaproteomics investigation of the microbial communities and enzymes in fermentation of Pu-erh tea demonstrated that the dominant bacteria and fungi were Proteobacteria (48.42%) and Aspergillus (94.98%), respectively, and that Aspergillus was the major host of identified proteins (50.45%) (Zhao et al, 2015).…”

“…Furthermore, yeasts rather than molds accounted for the overwhelming majority of eukaryota. These discrepancies may result from different Pu-erh tea materials and/or different production conditions, or sequencing depths (Lyu et al, 2013). In terms of bacterial composition, results vary among different research studies and differences are found when different methods are used.…”

Other Organism‐Based Processes and Products

“…Also contributing to caffeine content are growing conditions, processing techniques, and other variables. A preliminary metagenomic study of pure tea during pile fermentation (Lyu et al, 2013) revealed that major taxonomic bacterial phyla are Proteobacteria (23.56%), Actinobacteria (23.35%), and Firmicutes (11.37%), and one dominant eukaryotic phylum, Ascomycota (30.47%). Metagenomics, that is, direct analysis of the total community DNA, is able to obtain plentiful information content, including, taxonomic, metabolic potential and functional profiles of microbial communities (see Part I).…”