The active synergetic microbiota with Aspergillus as the core dominates the metabolic network of ester synthesis in medium-high temperature Daqu

The active ester-synthesis microorganisms in medium-high temperature Daqu (MHT-Daqu) largely impact the strong-flavor Baijiu quality, while their actual composition and metabolic mechanism remain unclear. Here, to explore how the active microbiota contributes to MHT-Daqu ester biosynthesis, metatranscriptomic and metaproteomic analyses coupled with experimental verification were performed. The results showed that the MHT-Daqu microbiota with the higher ester-forming ability exhibited a more active dynamic alteration from transcription to translation. The genera Aspergillus, Bacillus, Leuconostoc, and Pediococcus could transcribe and translate obviously more ester-forming enzymes. In the ester-synthesis metabolic network, the synergetic microbiota confirmed by interaction analysis, containing Eurotiales, Bacillales, and Saccharomycetales, played an essential role, in which the Eurotiales and its representative genus Aspergillus contributed the highest transcript and protein abundance in almost every metabolic process, respectively. The recombined fermentation verified that their corresponding genera could produce the ester and precursor profiles very close to that of the original MHT-Daqu active microbiota, while the microbiota without Aspergillus caused a polar separation. These results indicated that the synergetic microbiota with Aspergillus as the core dominated the metabolic network of ester synthesis in MHT-Daqu. Our study provides a detailed framework of the association between the active synergetic microbiota and ester synthesis in MHT-Daqu.