Bacterial community structure in the ordinary and fortified Daqu. food fermentation metagenome

Chinese liquor is produced from spontaneous fermentation starter (Daqu), which provides the microbes and flavors for liquor fermentation. To improve its flavor character of Daqu, we inoculated Daqu with Bacillus licheniformis, and investigated the effect of this strain on the global metabolic profile. The dynamics of the microbial community structure were revealed by high-throughput sequencing. It showed that the abundance of the bacterial microbial community composition changed under fortification, whereas the microbial diversity was not impacted throughout the whole process. For example, the growth of Bacillus was significantly enhanced. The other affected genera (Acetobacter, Acinetobacter, Brevibacterium, Corynebacterium, Lactobacillus, Staphylococcus) were all decreased, suggesting that bacterial variation mainly occurred in the later stage.