Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Microbial fermentations emerge from the collective activity of interacting species whose relative abundances, metabolic functions, and environmental constraints continuously change over time. Water kefir provides a tractable model to investigate how multispecies communities coordinate their metabolic activities during fermentation. Here, we combined time-resolved community profiling, physicochemical measurements, metabolite quantification, and controlled co-culture assays to characterize the dynamics of a water kefir consortium comprising 19 detected microbial species. Our results reveal that water kefir fermentation is not adequately described as a simple succession of independently acting microbial groups. Instead, the community undergoes a reproducible reorganization of its collective metabolism around 20 h of fermentation. This transition marks a shift from an early regime characterized by the accumulation of soluble sugars and ethanol to a later regime dominated by enhanced sugar consumption and lactate production. Controlled interaction assays further showed that bacterial partners can alter carbon-use behaviour in Saccharomyces cerevisiae , highlighting the capacity of interspecies interactions to reshape metabolic phenotypes within the consortium. Together, these results support an ecological view of water kefir fermentation in which community-wide metabolic reorganization emerges from the interplay between microbial interactions, resource availability, and environmental change.
Institutions: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Inserm, Sorbonne Université, Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Structure et Instabilité des Génomes, Données de recherche pour l'Histoire Naturelle, l'Ecologie et l'Environnement, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Institut National de Recherche pour l'Agriculture, l'Alimentation et l'Environnement, Laboratoire Reproduction et Développement des Plantes
Language: English
Subfield: Food Science
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7221513439