Dear Colleagues,

In recent decades, starter cultures have been developed to aid raw material processing with the aim of obtaining different types of fermented food products. In fact, properly developed selected starters represent a convenient solution to easily and safely carry out the fermentation when the concentration of the microbiota colonizing the production environment and the raw material itself turns out to be inadequate, or natural starter cultures are difficult to obtain and manage.

Different purposes can be pursued when developing a starter culture: a) selecting a low, defined number of species/strains, on the basis of their strong aptitude to fulfil the biochemical processes required by each production technology and for their suitability to be grown in the laboratory, or b) trying to reproduce autochthonous biodiverse natural cultures where an indefinite number of species and strains, starter and nonstarter (but crucial during the whole fermentation and ripening of food), coexist in equilibrium. Both choices have pros and cons.

On one hand, selected cultures, because of and despite their high technological efficiency, easily become the dominant microbiota of the product, causing a dramatic decrease in microbial biodiversity and loss of peculiar sensory characteristics of fermented food. In fact, this kind of cultures are widely applied, at high concentration, to industrial level productions that do not possess geographic niches and typicity.

On the contrary, natural microbial communities have a strains composition which is not reproducible in any place other than that of their origin, contributing to preserve microbial biodiversity and enriching products with peculiar sensory features that bind them to the territory. Indeed, autochthonous natural starter cultures usually characterize the most typical and high quality agri-food products. However, their technological performance is not standardized and their use is not risk-free since, together with useful autochthonous microorganisms, even pathogen or spoilage ones could be potentially inoculated and allowed to contaminate the product.

The goal of this Special Issue is to host innovative or review papers facing the challenge of developing starter cultures or, at least, laying the foundation for them, which could be applicable at artisanal, pilot or industrial scale, able to guaranteeing safety, quality constancy, technological performances reproducibility, preserving biodiversity, and peculiar sensory characteristics usually linked to traditional products, while overcoming the problems associated with the daily propagation of natural cultures. Furthermore, papers dealing with if and how fermented products consumption could affect human gastro-intestinal tract microbiota, and eventually the health of the consumers, would be welcome.

Dr. Roberta Comunian
Dr. Luigi Chessa
Guest Editors

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• starter cultures
• fermented food
• microbial biodiversity
• metagenomics
• traditional foods
• food safety
• antibiotic resistance
• microbial culture collections
• gut microbiota
• probiotics