Predictive functionality of bacteria in naturally fermented milk products of India using PICRUSt2 and Piphillin pipelines

Abstract Naturally fermented milk (NFM) products are popular food delicacies in Indian states of Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. Bacterial communities in these NFM products of India were previously analysed by high-throughput sequence method. However, predictive gene functionality of NFM products of India has not been studied. In this study, raw sequences of NFM products of Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh were accessed from MG-RAST/NCBI database server. PICRUSt2 and Piphillin tools were applied to study microbial functional gene prediction. MUSiCC-normalized KOs and mapped KEGG pathways from both PICRUSt2 and Piphillin resulted in higher percentage of the former in comparison to the latter. Though, functional features were compared from both the pipelines, however, there were significant differences between the predictions. Therefore, a consolidated presentation of both the algorithms presented an overall outlook into the predictive functional profiles associated with the microbiota of the NFM products of India.