Applied Microbiology and Beneficial Microbes

Wine is a complex beverage, which consist of hundreds of metabolites through the action of bacteria and yeasts. These microbial communities play an important role during the winemaking process, as they metabolize sugars from grapes and produce secondary metabolites that influence aromatic quality of wine. However, there is not enough knowledge about these microbial communities. Our goal is to accurately identify bacteria, yeasts, and especially bacteriophages, the most abundant organisms in biosphere, in grape must from Small Carpathian wine-producing region through the whole metagenomic sequencing method.

We extracted total DNA from the grape must and performed whole metagenome sequencing approach using Illumina NextSeq platform. Data obtained were analyzed with several bioinformatic methods. We used Meta-spades to assembly reads. The likely taxonomic source of each contig was estimated using BLAST. VirFinder was used to identify bacteriophage sequences from unidentified bacterial contigs. Reads were then classified with Clark using bacterial, viral and fungi database. We summarized taxonomic labels to the form of Krona graphs.

The whole metagenome sequencing approach allowed the identification of complex microbial community. We identified a good amount of microbial diversity and also some potential bacteriophage sequences.

Wine has a very diverse community of microorganisms. We examined this variety of microbial communities in grape must from Small Carpathian wine-producing region. This study allowed for a better characterization of grape must microbiome and helped to understand specificity of wine in this region.