Analysis of structure and function of phage community occurring in the abnormal fermentation of vinegar mash through virome sequencing.

In order to investigate the cues, which cause abnormal fermentation during the traditional Zhejiang rosy rice vinegar production, here, the Illumina Novaseq sequencing platform is adopted to decipher the abnormal phage community organization, structure, and related function annotation. The results show that the dominant viral families from the abnormal and the normal fermentation vinegar mash are inconsistency on known taxonomic identification information. Population network analysis and PCA (principal component analysis) indicate that the composition and structure of phage communities differ significantly between abnormal and normal fermentation vinegar mash. Only 3.29% VCs (viral clusters) simultaneously contain vOTUs (viral operational taxonomic units) from both fermentation situation. The abnormal phageome displays high network heterogeneity and dominant phage species at the genus level. Accompanied by the widespread distribution of phage-derived hydrolases that target bacterial cell wall, the lower proportion of lysogenic phages contributes to the phages of abnormal fermentation vinegar mash more inclined to lyse the hosts. Furthermore, the predicted bacterial host community coupling with the aberrant phage community is quite different from that in the normal vinegar fermentation. In conclusion, the abnormal structure and function of the phage community constitutes one of the primary reasons for the failure of traditional rosy vinegar fermentation. Phageome research has opened up a new approach for analyzing the causes of abnormal fermentation in traditional fermented foods as well as for regulating and transforming microbial communities.