16S profiling microbial communities from fermented African foods (Zambia, Benin, Tanzania)

In non-alcoholic fermented foods, the fermenting microbiota is commonly dominated by 4-10 species of bacteria, which make them suitable model systems to study ecosystem assembly and functioning. In this study, we assess the influence of the environment on the composition of their microbial communities, using of traditional fermented products from Africa as a model. We compare differences between microbial communities that are found in similar products but come from different countries, hypothesizing they experience different environmental selection pressures. We analyzed bacterial community composition in 36 samples of various cereal-based fermented foods from Benin, Tanzania and Zambia using 16S rDNA amplicon sequencing.