Historic Rebel cheese: microbial communities, volatilome, terpenes and fatty acid profiles reveal a huge biodiversity in cheeses produced in a limited area
Cheese is one of the most complex matrices among food products, due to the diversity of the microbial communities that characterize this foodstuff. The number of studies performed on dairy products has increased during the last decade, particularly those on milk and cheese derivative products. More recently, the introduction of high-throughput DNA sequencing techniques (HTS), by 16S rRNA gene amplification, has allowed a precise evaluation of the structure and the dynamics of the microbial communities in foodstuff.Historic Rebel (HR) cheese is an alpine heritage semi-cooked, semi-hard Italian cheese, produced from raw milk following old traditional practices during the grazing period (June-September).The aim of this project was to characterize the biodiversity of the microbiota and the lipophilic fraction (fatty acid composition, volatilome and terpenes) during the grazing period, in six HR producers, representing half of the current manufacturers, with the final goal to deeply characterize this heritage cheese in most of its aspects, especially those connected to its environment. HR microbiota was evaluated via sequencing of the hypervariable V3-V4 regions of 16S rRNA gene in 3 grazing periods, on 3 independent replicates each, for a total of 54 samples, on an Illumina MiSeq platform.