The study of bacterial communities in catfish (ictalurus punctatus) during storage
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Abstract
Fish is a lean source of protein and abundant in vitamins and minerals. Unfortunately, fresh fish deteriorates rapidly mainly due to microbial spoilage. With consumers’ health concerns about using harsh chemical preservatives, natural antimicrobials would be a safer, alternative solution to prevent microbial spoilage. Metagenomics refers to investigating microbial communities from foods, environmental samples etc. and understanding how they interact with one another. Bacterial taxonomy, as a whole can be classified using high throughput sequencing platforms. In this study a commercial store-bought catfish and a pond-raised catfish were treated individually with three natural preservatives. From the catfish samples under refrigerated storage, DNA libraries were sequenced on the Illumina MiSeq platform.
Of the 3 treatments, N#1 showed the most significant bacteria reduction at the midpoint (99%) in the store-bought fish and in the pond-raised fish in the late phase (>99%). Pseudomonas dominated the other bacteria in early phase for all sample treatments in the store-bought fish but was suppressed by the N#1 in middle phase which allowed for more diversity. In the pond-raised fish, Pseudomonas also dominated other bacteria in the sample treatments for the middle and late phases but never became the dominant bacterial species for the pond-raised N#1 samples which allowed for greater diversity overall. This knowledge can suggest effective natural preservative treatments to extend the shelf-life of fishery products.