Revealing the Succession of Spatial Heterogeneity of the Microbial Community during Broad Bean Paste Fermentation

Gaining insights into the community assembly processes is essential and valuable for the elaboration of underlying ecological patterns. However, current studies about microbial community succession in multispecies fermented food usually treat the research object as a whole, are focused exclusively on temporal dimensions, and have ignored the changes of community structure in spatial dimensions. Therefore, dissecting the community assembly process from the view of spatiotemporal dimensions will be a more comprehensive and detailed perspective. Here, we found the heterogenicity of the BBP microbial community under the traditional production technology from spatial and temporal scales, systematically analyzed the relationship between the spatiotemporal succession of community and the difference of BBP quality, and elucidated the roles of environmental factors and microbial interactions to drive the heterogeneous succession of the microbial community. Our findings provide a new insight into understanding the association between microbial community assembly and the quality of BBP.