starter culture-initiated cocoa fermentations followed up trough metagenetics

Starter culture-initiated cocoa fermentation processes are applied to improve the quality of the cured cocoa beans. In this study eight different cocoa fermentation processes were carried out in plastic vessels in Costa Rica to assess the contribution of two candidate yeasts starter culture strains, namely a Saccharomyces cerevisiae and a Pichia kudriavzevii strain, inoculated in combination with a Limosilactobacillus fermentum strain and an Acetobacter pasteurianus strain. The use of an amplicon sequence variant (ASV) approach, together with the available genomes of the inoculated strains allowed their identification and differentiation of very close related variants/strains naturally present in the spontaneous fermentation processes.