Acetic acid bacteria from Unimore microbial culture collection: biolomics platform as a tool for their industrial exploitation

Unimore Microbial Culture Collection includes a pool of acetic acid bacteria (AAB) strains collected since 2000. Main isolation sources of the UMCC AAB strains are wine vinegars, balsamic vinegars, cereal vinegars, fermented juices and kombucha tea. During the years, methods to recover representative isolates and preserve phenotypic stability were improved within UMCC, in order to investigate the key traits useful for their industrial exploitation. Acetic acid bacteria have attractive features useful in performing conventional and innovative processes/products. They incompletely oxidize sugars, alcohols and polyols to the corresponding oxidation products and they are exploited by pharmaceutical, medical, chemical and food-grade industries for the production of acetic acid, dihydroxyacetone, gluconic acid, 2-keto-L-gulonic acid and cellulose. Phenotypic changes, mainly regarding ethanol oxidation, acetic acid resistance and cellulose production, have been detected, consequently, suitable preservation methods and check procedures are performed in UMCC. The AAB strains are identified and characterized by a polyphasic approach and molecular typing are performed by fingerprinting techniques (ERIC/PCR and GTG5). Target strain performance and fermentation assays are developed at pilot scale to provide industrial strains. The BioloMICS (BioAware) platform of UMCC allows a comprehensive data management that combines phenotypic and molecular traits with industrial strain performance.