ABSTRACT
All over the world, fermented food products form an integral part of the human diet. For centuries, the preparation of fermented foods involved spontaneous fermentation by indigenous microbial activity present in the environment and in the food ingredients. Knowledge of these microbial communities is essential for shaping the final characteristic of the product and also provides an insight into the fermentation product. Earlier, traditional culture-dependent methods were employed for enumeration of microbial diversity. These methods required the cultivation of microorganisms on a synthetic medium. The advancements in food microbiology have led to the application of culture-independent techniques for elucidating the microbial ecology associated with the fermented food products. Culture-independent approaches such as PCR-DGGE and sequencing have helped in studying microbial activities during fermentation. Among culture-independent techniques, sequencing techniques have been widely used to exploit the microbial population. Various NGS techniques like Ion torrent, Roche pyrosequencing and Illumina have resulted in in-depth analysis of microbial species. Besides this, metatranscriptome, and metagenomics also helps in studying microbial consortia in several fermented products. The knowledge gained about the microbial diversity and the changes that are taking place during fermentation process via the use of sequencing techniques is vital 264in monitoring the process and improving the food quality. Besides these approaches, an emerging field in the ‘omics’ sciences, viz., metabolomics has been applied to the fermentation process for the study of metabolites generated. This chapter deals with techniques associated with the study of microbial diversity present in fermented food products.
