Bacterial Microbiota and Chemical Properties of Turkish Tarhana

Abstract

Tarhana is one of the traditional Turkish fermented food and it is served as a soup. In this study, bacterial microbiota and chemical properties (acidity, salt, and moisture content) of tarhana samples (n=96) were examined. The metagenomic analysis revealed that Firmicutes were the dominant phylum and Bacillaceae, Enterococcaceae, Paenibacillaceae, Enterobacteriaceae, and Clostridiaceae were the dominant bacterial families. In the samples, Bacillus, Enterococcus, and Paenibacillus were mostly identified at the genus level. Alpha diversity and evenness showed that sample 30 had the highest diversity collected from İzmir. Principal Coordinate Analysis was used to identify relationships of samples at different taxonomic levels and it was found that most of the samples were closely related at the phylum level. Chemical analysis indicated that the acidity of tarhana samples varied between 5.00% and 42.5%, moisture contents were 4.39–18.66% and salt values were from 0.32% to 6.64%. The results of this study extensively demonstrated the chemical properties and the dominant bacterial communities present in tarhana samples collected from different parts of Türkiye.