Metabolomics and bacterial diversity of packaged yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares) and salmon (Salmo salar) show fish-specific spoilage development during chilled storage. FISH amplicons

Microbial activity is the major cause of raw fish spoilage, even though the first changes are caused by the endogenous enzymes of fish. It is estimated that 30% of landed/caught fish is lost through microbial activity alone . The main focus of the present study was on the bacterial diversity and formation and evolution of metabolites as studied by metabolomics during shelf-life. For this purpose, we used proton nuclear magnetic resonance (1H NMR) spectroscopy, which is powerful technique for explorative food analyses .The connection of bacterial sequence data with metabolomics results helped us to increase our understanding of bacterial growth and concomitant activity of the microbial pathways in salmon and tuna during cold storage. We discovered that the microbial communites in these two fish species were quite different. The species dominating were Photobacterium spp. and Pseudomonas spp. in salmon and tuna, respectively.