Human have eaten various traditional fermented foods for a numbers of million years for health benefit as well as survival. The beneficial effects of fermented foods have been resulted from complex microbial communications within the fermented foods. ...
Human have eaten various traditional fermented foods for a numbers of million years for health benefit as well as survival. The beneficial effects of fermented foods have been resulted from complex microbial communications within the fermented foods. Therefore, the holistic approaches for individual identification and complete microbial profiling involved in their communications have been of interest to food microbiology fields. Microbiome is the ecological community of microorganisms that literally share our environments including foods as well as human body. However, due to the limitation of culture-dependent methods such as simple isolations of just culturable microorganisms, the culture-independent methods have been consistently developed, resulting in new light on the diverse non-culturable and hitherto unknown microorganisms, and even microbial communities in the fermented foods. For the culture-independent approaches, the food microbiome has been deciphered by employing various molecular analysis tools such as fluorescence in situ hybridization, quantitative PCR, and denaturing gradient gel-electrophoresis. More recently, next-generation-sequencing (NGS) platform-based microbiome analysis has been of interest, because NGS is a powerful analytical tool capable of resolving the microbiome in respect to community structures, dynamics, and active ties. In this overview, the development status of analysis tools for the fermented food microbiome is covered and research trend for NGS-based food microbiome analysis is also discussed.