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High biodiversity in a limited mountain area revealed in the traditional production of Historic Rebel cheese by an integrated microbiota-lipidomic approach.

ABSTRACT: Historic Rebel (HR) cheese is an Italian heritage cheese, produced from raw milk during the summer grazing period in the Alps. The aim of this work was (i) to characterize the cheese microbiota, by 16S rRNA gene amplicons sequencing, and the volatile and non-volatile lipophilic fraction, by Gas Chromatography and Dynamic Headspace Extraction-Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry, and (ii) to evaluate their respective associations. HR cheese was dominated by Firmicutes phylum (99% of the entire abundance). The core microbiota was formed by Streptococcus, Lactobacillus, Lactococcus, Leuconostoc and Pediococcus genera together representing 87.2-99.6% of the total abundance. The polyunsaturated fatty acids composition showed a high PUFA n-3, PUFA n-6 and CLA content, two fold higher than typical plain cheeses, positively correlated with pasture altitude. A complex volatilome was detected, dominated in terms of abundance by ketones, fatty acids and alcohols. Total terpene levels increased at higher altitudes, being the main terpenes compounds α-pinene, camphene and β-pinene. The HR cheese showed a great diversity of bacterial taxa and lipophilic fractions among producers, despite belonging to a small alpine area, revealing a scarce cheese standardization and a chemical fingerprint of a typical mountain cheese produced during the grazing period. A deeper knowledge of the variability of HR cheese due to its composition in microbial community and volatile compounds will be appreciated, in particular, by elite consumers looking for niche products, adding economic value to farming in these alpine areas.

SUBMITTER: Turri F

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8121794 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:South Africa is a megadiverse country with three globally recognised biodiversity hotspots within its borders. Bees in particular show high diversity and endemism in the western part of the country. Not much is currently known about the floral host preferences of indigenous bees in South Africa, with data only available from observational studies. Pollen metabarcoding provides provenance information by utilising DNA analyses instead of floral visitation and traditional microscopic identification to identify pollinator food plants, which can be time consuming and imprecise. In this study, we sampled pollen from leaf-cutter bees (Megachilidae) specimens maintained in a historic insect collection (National Collection of Insects, South Africa) that were originally collected from two florally important areas in South Africa (Succulent Karoo and Savanna) and used metabarcoding to determine pollen provenance. We also sampled pollen from leafcutter bee species with wider distributions, that extend across many different biomes, to determine if these 'generalist' species show relaxed floral host specificity in some biomes. Metabarcoding involved sequencing of the nuclear internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2) region. Amplicons were compared to a sequence reference database to assign taxonomic classifications to family level. Sequence reads were also clustered to OTUs based on 97% sequence similarity to estimate numbers of plant species visited. We found no significant difference in the mean number of plant taxa visited in the Succulent Karoo and Savanna regions, but the widespread group visited significantly more floral hosts. Bees from the widespread group were also characterised by a significantly different composition in pollen assemblage. The time since specimens were collected did not have an effect on the mean number of taxa visited by any of the bee species studied. This study highlights national history collections as valuable sources of temporal and spatial biodiversity data.

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High biodiversity in a limited mountain area revealed in the traditional production of Historic Rebel cheese by an integrated microbiota-lipidomic approach.

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