Poster Presentation Australian Microbial Ecology 2022

Defining microbial community dynamics in spontaneous fermentation of palm wine and association with metabolomic profile. (#146)

I Nyoman Sumerta 1 2 , Pangzhen Zhang 1 , Kate Howell 1
  1. Faculty of Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VICTORIA, Australia
  2. Research Center for Applied Microbiology, National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), Cibinong, West Java, Indonesia

Palm wine is a fermentation product of the sap tapped from immature inflorescence of palm trees. Palm wine production is usually applied by local people to produce traditional spirits. The fermentation is conducted spontaneously after the sugary sap is collected and left in open air fermentation vessels. The fermentation process is short for alcohol production (3-4 days) and palm vinegar is produced after longer fermentation duration. Spontaneous fermentation of palm wine is driven by a complex microbial community affecting the quality of the palm wine or distilled derivatives. Maintaining the quality of palm wine is a challenge for industrial scale production and for understanding regional flavour diversity. The presence of spoilage microbes, for instance, affects the palm wine characters which are associated with the metabolomic profile. In other fermented beverages, the dynamics of microbial community during spontaneous fermentation is strongly related to metabolite constituents in the final product. A study in microbial dynamic in fermentation and what the constituent of associated metabolites is required to obtain a real picture of spontaneous fermentation in palm wine. The development of advanced technologies in molecular techniques provides a better insight into microbial community profiling through next generation sequencing, linked to detected metabolic profile. Combining both aspects provide a complete picture of spontaneous fermentation for product quality tracking and suggest a new perspective for effective fermentation to optimize the alcohol production by managing the microbial community.