Functional strain redundancy and persistent phage infection in Swiss hard cheese starter cultures.

ABSTRACT: Undefined starter cultures are poorly characterized bacterial communities from environmental origin used in cheese making. They are phenotypically stable and have evolved through domestication by repeated propagation in closed and highly controlled environments over centuries. This makes them interesting for understanding eco-evolutionary dynamics governing microbial communities. While cheese starter cultures are known to be dominated by a few bacterial species, little is known about the composition, functional relevance, and temporal dynamics of strain-level diversity. Here, we applied shotgun metagenomics to an important Swiss cheese starter culture and analyzed historical and experimental samples reflecting 82 years of starter culture propagation. We found that the bacterial community i

SUBMITTER: Somerville V 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8776748 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature