Undefined strain starters are used for the production of many traditional and artisanal cheeses. Composition of undefined starters depends on several factors, and the diversity in strains and species significantly affects cheese quality and features. Culture-dependent approaches have long been used for the microbial profiling and functionalities of undefined cultures but underestimate their diversity due to culturability biases. Recently, culture-independent methods, based on high-throughput sequencing (HTS), have been preferred, with a significant boost in resolution power and sensitivity level. Amplicon targeted (AT) metagenomics, based on 16S rRNA sequencing, returned a larger microbiota diversity at genus and, sometimes, at species levels for artisanal starters of several PDO cheeses, but was inappropriate for populations with high strain diversity, and other gene targets were tested in AT approaches. Shotgun metagenomics (total DNA) and metatranscriptomics (total RNA), although are more powerful in depicting diversity and functionality of undefined cultures, have been rarely applied because of some limitations (e.g., high costs and laboriousness, need for bioinformatics skills). The advantages of HTS technologies are undoubted, but some hurdles need to be still overcame (e.g., resolution power, discrepancy between active and inactive cells, robust analytic pipelines, cost and time reduction for integrated approaches) so that HTS become routinary and convenient for defining complexity, microbial interactions (including host-phage relationships) and evolution in cheeses of undefined starters.
Keywords: 16S metabarcoding; bacteriophages; high-throughput sequencing; natural dairy starter; starter composition; strain diversity.