Lebanon’s Native Oenological Saccharomyces cerevisiae Flora: Assessment of Different Aspects of Genetic Diversity and Evaluation of Winemaking Potential

Abstract

A total of 296 isolates of Saccharomyces cerevisiae sampled from naturally fermenting grape musts from various locations in Lebanon were typed by interdelta fingerprinting. Of these, 88 isolates were compared with oenological strains originating from various countries, using microsatellite characterization at six polymorphic loci. These approaches evidenced a large diversity of the natural oenological Lebanese flora over the territory as well as in individual spontaneous fermentations. Several cases of dominance and perenniality of isolates were observed in the same wineries, where fermentations appeared to involve lineages of sibling isolates. Our work thus evidenced a “winery effect” on strains’ relatedness. Similarly, related or identical strains were also detected in vicinal wineries, suggesting strain circulation within small geographical areas and a further “vicinity effect”. Moreover, and despite its diversity, the Lebanese flora seemed interrelated, on the basis of microsatellite loci analysis, in comparison to worldwide communities. We finally tested the ability of 21 indigenous strains to act as potential starters for winemaking. Seven of them passed our pre-selection scheme and two of them at least may be good candidates for use provided pilot-scale assays confirm their suitability.

Raw goat's milk fermented Anbaris from Lebanon: insights into the microbial dynamics and chemical changes occurring during artisanal production, with a focus on yeasts

“…It will be interesting in this perspective to compare Lebanese dairy strains of this species to worldwide dairy isolates of K. marxianus , using for example MLST typing as developed by Tittarelli et al . (2018), to check for any specificity they might have as it is found in other Lebanese species involved in natural fermentations (Ayoub et al ., 2021). It also appeared that the same lineage of isolates was involved in the fermentation of a given sample since the same or almost identical patterns were found at our different fermentation stages.…”

Sexually-Driven Combinatorial Diversity in Native Saccharomyces Wine Yeasts

“…Genetic differences of S. cerevisiae wine strains are usually discriminated by using a variety of DNA-based methods, including mitochondrial DNA restriction fragment length polymorphism (mtDNA-RFLP), inter-delta PCR [6], SNP analysis [7] and RAD-seq [8]. Microsatellite analysis, however, remains a popular method to investigate genetic diversity in vineyard-and cellar-associated S. cerevisiae studies [9][10][11][12]. Yeast microsatellite loci consist of short tandem-repeated DNA sequences of highly variable length [13].…”