Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

Kombucha Tea as a Reservoir of Cellulose Producing Bacteria: Assessing Diversity Among Komagataeibacter Isolates

Version 1 : Received: 31 December 2020 / Approved: 4 January 2021 / Online: 4 January 2021 (13:24:41 CET)

A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.

La China, S.; Vero, L.D.; Anguluri, K.; Brugnoli, M.; Mamlouk, D.; Gullo, M. Kombucha Tea as a Reservoir of Cellulose Producing Bacteria: Assessing Diversity among Komagataeibacter Isolates. Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 1595. La China, S.; Vero, L.D.; Anguluri, K.; Brugnoli, M.; Mamlouk, D.; Gullo, M. Kombucha Tea as a Reservoir of Cellulose Producing Bacteria: Assessing Diversity among Komagataeibacter Isolates. Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 1595.

Abstract

Bacterial cellulose (BC) is receiving great attention due to its unique properties such as high purity, water retention capacity, high mechanical strength, and biocompatibility. However, the production of BC has been limited because of high cost and low productivity. In this light, the isolation of new BC producing bacteria and selection of high productive strains became a promising issue. Kombucha tea is a fermented beverage in which the bacteria fraction of the microbial community is composed mostly by strains belonging to the genus Komagataeibacter. In this study Kombucha tea production trials were performed starting from a previous batch, and bacterial isolation was conducted along cultivation time. From the whole microbial pool, 46 isolates were tested for their ability in producing BC. The obtained BC yield ranged from 0.59 g/L, for the isolate K2G36, to 23 g/L for K2G30 used as the reference strain. The genetic intraspecific diversity of the 46 isolates was investigated using two repetitive-sequence-based PCR typing methods, which are the enterobacterial repetitive intergenic consensus (ERIC) elements and the (GTG)5 sequences, respectively. The results obtained using two different approaches revealed the suitability of the fingerprints techniques, showing a discrimination power, calculated as D index, of 0.94 for (GTG)5 rep-PCR and 0.95 for ERIC rep-PCR. In order to improve the sensitivity of the applied method, a combined model from the two genotyping experiments was performed, allowing to discriminate among strains.

Keywords

Kombucha tea; microbial diversity; bacterial cellulose; Komagataeibacter xylinus; repetitive elements sequence-based rep-PCR; typing

Subject

Biology and Life Sciences, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

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