Reacción a "Metagenome sequencing of bacteria, fungi, and yeasts present in more than 2,500 foods"

The reference article published in Cell by Carlino and collaborators represents a significant collaborative effort among various European research centers from different countries. This work has been funded by the MASTER project of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program and is, in some way, continued in the new DOMINO project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe program, which is currently being developed.

This work represents, by far, the most significant scientific effort for the microbiological characterization of fermented foods (dairy, meat, fish, cereals, etc.) and their respective raw materials, using the latest generation massive sequencing techniques and the most advanced computational tools. The microbiomes of these products present enormous microbial diversity, both in prokaryotic organisms (bacteria) and eukaryotic organisms (fungi and yeasts), much of which turned out to have no cultivated representatives.

As a result, as the authors themselves propose, one of the first future research actions will be directed toward selective culturing to recover these new taxa and characterize them in depth, which will include tests to estimate their practical and safe use. Only in this way could these new microorganisms potentially be used as starter cultures or adjunct cultures in the fermentation of the foods from which they are isolated, or to initiate other new ones.

The contribution of food microbiomes to the human gastrointestinal microbiome in adults, which could have implications for maintaining intestinal microbial homeostasis linked to health, seems modest. Only 3% of the food species taxa are also found as components of adult gut microbiome. However, there are clear indications that foods are what causes the presence of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae in the human intestine, which is otherwise abundant in many foods.

It would be desirable to continue this microbiological characterization by including more samples and more diverse foods, which will allow, in the future, the identification of unique microbial food markers, as well as the reliable use of these techniques to ensure the traceability and authenticity of foods, as the authors propose.