Exploration of Probiotic Microbial Biodiversity in Acidic Environments (Curd) and Their Futuristic Pharmaceutical Applications

Probiotics are potential health-promoting microorganisms representing a significant health aid with diverse pharmaceutical applications. But its role in modulating the human gut microbiome necessities a profound analysis. Undoubtedly, the human gut is a reservoir of infinite species such as bacteria, viruses, fungi, etc. But host with chronic illness bids enrichment of the pathogenic strain which may alter the composition gut microbiome. Culture-based techniques are providing unclear taxonomic data where the possibility of the discrepancy is very high. Therefore the use of next-generation sequencing (NGS) analysis helps to explore depth understanding of the curd microbiome and can generate big genomic data. The present investigation aims to explore the microbial diversity of curd samples from different local dairy farms of Odisha, India using a metagenomic approach. The data read comprising 304,725 sequences totaling 148,546,295 base pairs were interpreted. Taxonomical distribution at different levels unfolded the absolute abundance of phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species within each microbial community. The most dominant species found to be Lactobacillus at order level is 49%, whereas phyla proteobacteria and firmicutes have shown taxonomic percentage abundance of 50.01% and 48.77%, respectively. However, nearly 26.41% of unclassified species from the Lactococcus genus were identified in the sample at different taxonomic levels. The metagenomics sequence data has been deposited to sequence read archive (SRA) of NCBI database under Bioproject PRJNA383620. The present study has vital implications in understanding the microbial diversity in curd samples with their role in human health and application in future pharmaceutical probiotic research.