Exploring lactic acid bacteria diversity for better fermentation of plant-based dairy alternatives
Wenkang Huang A , Anders Peter Wätjen B , Sangeeta Prakash A , Claus Heiner Bang-Berthelsen B * and Mark S. Turner A *A School of Agriculture and Food Sciences, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Qld, Australia.
B National Food Institute, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark.
Wenkang Huang is a PhD student in the School of Agriculture and Food Sciences at the University of Queensland. His research focus is on plant-based milk alternatives fermentation using lactic acid bacteria. He is currently working in the collaborative project between the University of Queensland and Technical University of Denmark. |
Anders Peter Wätjen is a PhD student, with an alliance scholarship between Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and University of Queensland. He is investigating flavour production in plant-based dairy alternatives through lactic acid fermentation. |
Dr Prakash is an academic at the University of Queensland with extensive experience in processing, physical characterisation and sensory profiling of food ingredients and products, including proteins (dairy and plant), hydrocolloids, dairy products (milk, yoghurt, custard, cream cheese, and dairy beverages), rice and meat. Her research interest also extends to 3D food printing and the digestibility of food ingredients in the human gastrointestinal tract. |
Claus Heiner Bang-Berthelsen is a senior scientist at DTU National Food Institute. He is the lead investigator in a research team exploring plant-based dairy alternatives and novel food fermentation and valorisations of side-streams by fermentation. He teaches food microbiology and biochemistry courses at DTU. |
Mark Turner is a Professor in food microbiology and Deputy Head of the School of Agriculture and Food Sciences at the University of Queensland. He currently leads a research team exploring food fermentation, quality and safety and teaches food microbiology courses. |
Microbiology Australia 43(2) 79-82 https://doi.org/10.1071/MA22026
Submitted: 19 March 2022 Accepted: 20 April 2022 Published: 17 May 2022
© 2022 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of the ASM. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND)
Abstract
Plant-based foods have risen in popularity in recent years including a number of dairy alternative products. Fermentation has the potential to support the development of innovative plant-based foods with enhanced flavour, texture and nutritional quality. Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) have been used for thousands of years to carry out fermentation of a wide variety of food substrates through production of organic acids and flavour compounds. However, LAB strains used in dairy fermentations are commonly found to be suboptimal in their metabolism of plant substrates, so efforts to identify alternative strains are needed. We provide an overview of the plant-based milk alternative category and explore screening approaches (including citizen-science efforts) to identify new LAB that hold potential in acidification and flavour formation of plant-based substrates.
Keywords: almond, alternative protein, citizen science, dairy-alternatives, fermentation, flavour, lactic acid bacteria, new foods, plant based.
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