Phyllosphere microbial community of cigar tobacco and its corresponding metabolites

Tiantian Liu; Shiping Guo; Chongde Wu; Ruina Zhang; Qiu Zhong; Hongzhi Shi; Rongqing Zhou; Yanqing Qin; Yao Jin

doi:10.3389/fmicb.2022.1025881

Phyllosphere microbial community of cigar tobacco and its corresponding metabolites

Front Microbiol. 2022 Nov 11:13:1025881. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2022.1025881. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Tiantian Liu^{1

2}, Shiping Guo³, Chongde Wu^{1

2}, Ruina Zhang⁴, Qiu Zhong⁴, Hongzhi Shi⁵, Rongqing Zhou^{1

2}, Yanqing Qin³, Yao Jin^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ College of Biomass Science and Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China.
² Key Laboratory of Leather Chemistry and Engineering, Ministry of Education, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China.
³ R&D Department, Sichuan Provincial Branch of China National Tobacco Crop Tobacco Science Institute, Chengdu, China.
⁴ R&D Department, Deyang Tobacco Company of Sichuan Province, Sichuan, Deyang, China.
⁵ College of Tobacco Science, Henan Agricultural University, Zhengzhou, China.

Abstract

Cigar is made of a typical fermented tobacco where the microbiota inhabits within an alkaline environment. Our current understanding on cigar fermentation is far from thorough. This work employed both high-throughput sequencing and chromatography-mass spectrometric technologies to provide new scientific reference for this specific fermented system. Typical cigar samples from different regions (the Caribbeans, South America, East Asia, and Southeast Asia) were investigated. The results show that Firmicutes, Actinobacteria, Proteobacteria, Ascomycota, and Basidiomycota were the predominant phyla in the cigar samples. Rather than the fungal community, it was the bacterial community structures that played vital roles to differentiate the cigar from different regions: Staphylococcus was the dominant genus in the Americas; Bacillus was the dominant genus in Southeast Asia; while in East Asia, there was no dominant genus. Such differences in community structure then affected the microflora metabolism. The correlation between microbiota and metabolites revealed that Aspergillaceae, Cercospora, and Staphylococcus were significantly correlated with sclareolide; Bacillus were positively associated with isophorone. Alcaligenaceae was significantly and positively correlated with L-nicotine and hexadecanoic acid, methyl ester. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT.

Keywords: GC–MS; cigar fermentation; high throughput sequencing; microbial community; volatile metabolites.