ABSTRACT
To secure a sustainable food supply for the rapidly growing global population, great efforts towards a plant-based diet are underway. However, the use of plant proteins comes with several challenges, such as improvement or removal of undesired flavours, and generation of desired texture properties. Fermentation holds large potential to alter these properties, but compared to dairy fermentations, our knowledge on strain properties in different plant-based substrates is still limited. Here, we explored different lactic acid bacteria for their ability to grow, produce flavour compounds, or remove off-flavour compounds from different plant proteins. For this, 151 LAB strains from dairy and non-dairy origins were cultured in plant protein plus coconut oil emulsions supplemented with glucose. Pea, chickpea, mung, fava, and soybean proteins were used in the study and bacterial strains for screening included the genera Streptococcus, Lactococcus, Lactobacillus, and Leuconostoc. Efficient, high throughput, screening on plant proteins was developed and strains were assessed for their ability to (i) acidify and decrease the pH; (ii) express key enzymes involved in the formation of amino acid derived flavours, which included PepN (aminopeptidase N), PepXP (X-prolyl dipeptidyl peptidase), EstA (esterase), BcAT (branched chain aminotransferase), CBL (cystathione beta lyase), and ArAT (aromatic aminotransferase); and (iii) improve the overall aroma profile by generating dairy/cheesy notes and decreasing off flavours. Suitable screening conditions were determined, and highlighted the importance that a sufficient heat treatment must be applied to samples containing plant proteins, prior to fermentation, as an outgrowth of spore forming Bacillus cereus was observed if the material was only pasteurised. Enzyme activities for strains measured in rich broth vs. a buffered protein solution showed little-to-no correlation, which illustrated the importance of screening conditions to obtain predictive enzyme measurements. Aroma formation analysis allowed to identify strains that were able to increase key aromas such as diacetyl, acetoin, 2- and 3-methyl butanol, and 2,3-pentanedione, as well as decrease the off-flavours hexanal, pentanal, and nonanal. Our findings illustrate the importance of strain specific differences in the assessed functionalities and how a methodical approach to screening LAB can be applied to select suitable microorganisms that show promise in fermentation of plant proteins when applied in non-dairy cheese applications.
ABSTRACT
MicroVinification platforms are used for screening purposes to study aroma development in wine. These high-throughput methodologies require flavor analysis techniques that allow fast detection of a high number of aroma compounds which often appear in very low concentrations (µg/l). In this work, a selection of aroma extraction techniques in combination with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) were evaluated to detect minor wine aroma compounds in low sample volume. The techniques evaluated were headspace (HS), headspace solid-phase dynamic extraction (HS-SPDE), headspace solid-phase microextraction (HS-SPME), direct immersion solid-phase microextraction (DI-SPME), stir bar sorptive extraction (SBSE) and monolithic material sorptive extraction (MMSE). DI-SPME showed the highest sensitivity as expressed by detection of the highest percentage of total aroma compounds at concentrations around 0.1 µg/l. SBSE and MMSE followed DI-SPME in terms of sensitivity. HS-SPME was less sensitive but considered sensitive enough for detection of most of the volatile compounds present in highly aromatic wines. Matrix effect was shown to strongly affect aroma extraction and therefore the sensitivity of the different extraction methods.
