Ecological succession and functional characteristics of lactic acid bacteria in traditional fermented foods

Abstract

Fermented foods are important parts of traditional food culture with a long history worldwide. Abundant nutritional materials and open fermentation contribute to the diversity of microorganisms, resulting in unique product quality and flavor. Lactic acid bacteria (LAB), as important part of traditional fermented foods, play a decisive role in the quality and safety of fermented foods. Reproduction and metabolic of microorganisms drive the food fermentation, and microbial interaction plays a major role in the fermentation process. Nowadays, LAB have attracted considerable interest due to their potentialities to add functional properties to certain foods or as supplements along with the research of gut microbiome. This review focuses on the characteristics of diversity and variability of LAB in traditional fermented foods, and describes the principal mechanisms involved in the flavor formation dominated by LAB. Moreover, microbial interactions and their mechanisms in fermented foods are presented. They provide a theoretical basis for exploiting LAB in fermented foods and improving the quality of traditional fermented foods. The traditional fermented food industry should face the challenge of equipment automation, green manufacturing, and quality control and safety in the production.

Graphical Abstract

Keywords:

• Traditional fermented foods
• lactic acid bacteria
• ecological succession
• metabolic mechanism
• microbial interaction

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by the National Key Research and Development Plan (2018YFC1602101 and 2017YFC1600401), National Natural Science Foundation of China (31972064), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province, China (BK20210468), and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2021M701467), National First-class Discipline Program of Light Industry Technology and Engineering (LITE2018-14), and Program of Introducing Talents of Discipline to Universities (111-2-06).