Correlation changes of microbial communities and metabolites in tobacco waste extract during its fermentation with additional Zygosaccharomyces sp. MC-5K3

Abstract

Tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum L.) is a very important economic crop in China but lead to a large quantity of tobacco waste during processing. Nowadays, industrial tobacco waste was mainly treated via reconstituted tobacco process by papermaking method, during which liquid tobacco waste extract (TWE) is the key fermentation step to control the final product quality. As bioaugmentation with specific functional microorganisms was one effective method in the quality optimization of fermented products, some native strains were isolated from TWE and used as bioaugmentation agents. In this study, Zygosaccharomyces sp. MC-5K3 isolated from TWE was used as the additive to improve the quality of fermented TWE. The results proved that the addition of Zygosaccharomyces sp. MC-5K3 significantly influence the microbial diversity of fermented TWE especially for the fungal groups that Zygosaccharomyces become the only dominant fungal genus instead of some pathogenic bacterial genera. Then the metabolomics profiling of fermented TWE showed that the variation in the concentration of 3-Hydroxybenzoic acid was the key influence factor on fermented TWE quality after MC-5K3 was added. The correlation analysis showed that the change of microbial diversity of the fermented production due to the addition of MC-5K3 leaded to some important differential metabolites such as 3-Hydroxybenzoic acid and finally improved various qualities of tobacco products. In conclusion, this study lays a theoretical foundation and new microbiology methods for improving the quality of tobacco products by new microbiology methods.