The microbial composition and functional roles of different kombucha products in Singapore

Figures & data

Figure 1. A. Heatmap of microbial species. The heatmap of 81 microbial species detected across the nine kombucha products after filtering for species with >0.1% relative abundance.

Table 1. Commercial claims and microbiome profiles of the kombucha products (n = 9) included in this study.

Starter culture	Product	Type of dominant bacteria present	Probiotics added*	Number of microbial species	Number of functional pathways	Average pathways per species
Acidifier	A	Others	None	27	314	11.63
Acidifier	B	AAB	None	4	130	32.5
SCOBY	C	Others	None	96	390	4.06
SCOBY	D	AAB	Yeast and Lactobacillus species	4	148	37
Unknown	E	LAB	Bacillus coagulans	3	117	58.5
Unknown	F	LAB	Bacillus coagulans	2	137	45.67
SCOBY	G	AAB	Yeast of the Saccharomyces genus and bacteria from Acetobacter and Gluconobacter species	3	97	32.33
SCOBY	H	LAB	None	7	192	27.43
SCOBY	I	AAB	None	6	142	23.67

*As claimed by the kombucha manufacturer.

Figure 2. (a) Functional pathways. The top 59 functional pathways after removing those with less than 1% relative abundance (the relative abundances were normalised to 100% in this figure) across all the nine kombucha products. (b) Species contribution. The relative abundances of the top 20 functional pathways contributed by three categories of microbes; AAB, LAB and others. Unclassified species contributing to the pathways across the nine products were excluded.