Seasonal Shifts in Fungal and Microbial Consortia in a Traditional Bryndza Cheese-Producing Facility Over Several Years

The microbial communities in small Slovak enterprises producing Bryndza cheese play a crucial role in determining the microbiological safety and quality of the final products. To explore seasonal variations in these microbial communities, samples of raw materials, intermediary materials, environmental swabs, whey, and final products were collected and analyzed over three years using culture-based microbiological methods. In the second and third years, high-throughput sequencing was additionally applied to production surface swabs, focusing on fungal metagenomics in environmental samples for more detailed microbial composition analysis. This sequencing technique was also used to assess the fungal microbiota present in indoor air samples.