Taxonomic and functional insights on bacterial communities in traditional Koumiss Raw sequence reads. Taxonomic and functional insights on bacterial communities in traditional Koumiss

Koumiss, as a fermented mare milk beverage, has attracted increasing attention, due to its nutritional richness and important economical value. In order to reveal the changes of the microbial communities in koumiss how are related to the quality of the fermentation products during the traditional fermentation process. The dynamic changes of the physical and chemical, nutritional, indicators were determined firstly in the present study. Then the metagenomics sequencing technology was applied to profile the koumiss core microbiota at the species level. Thirdly, the active microbial function was investigated by comparatively analyzing the metagenomices of representative samples collected at different fermentation time points. 23 major functional categories were identified. Functional category L (represented replication, recombination, and repair related function) is one of most important category with the highest relative abundance in all of the 23 major functional categories.