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. 2024 Apr 23;13(9):1285.
doi: 10.3390/foods13091285.

Bacterial Metabarcoding of Raw Palm Sap Samples from Bangladesh with Nanopore Sequencing

Ágota Ábrahám  1 , Md Nurul Islam  2 , Zoltán Gazdag  3 , Shahneaz Ali Khan  4 , Sharmin Chowdhury  5 , Gábor Kemenesi  1   3 , Sazeda Akter  6
Affiliations

Bacterial Metabarcoding of Raw Palm Sap Samples from Bangladesh with Nanopore Sequencing

Ágota Ábrahám et al. Foods. .

Abstract

The traditional practice of harvesting and processing raw date palm sap is not only culturally significant but also provides an essential nutritional source in South Asia. However, the potential for bacterial or viral contamination from animals and environmental sources during its collection remains a serious and insufficiently studied risk. Implementing improved food safety measures and collection techniques could mitigate the risk of these infections. Additionally, the adoption of advanced food analytical methods offers the potential to identify pathogens and uncover the natural bacterial diversity of these products. The advancement of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies, particularly nanopore sequencing, offers a rapid and highly mobile solution. In this study, we employed nanopore sequencing for the bacterial metabarcoding of a set of raw date palm sap samples collected without protective coverage against animals in Bangladesh in 2021. We identified several bacterial species with importance in the natural fermentation of the product and demonstrated the feasibility of this NGS method in the surveillance of raw palm sap products. We revealed two fermentation directions dominated by either Leuconostoc species or Lactococcus species in these products at the first 6 h from harvest, along with opportunistic human pathogens in the background, represented with lower abundance. Plant pathogens, bacteria with the potential for opportunistic human infection and the sequences of the Exiguobacterium genus are also described, and their potential role is discussed. In this study, we demonstrate the potential of mobile laboratory solutions for food safety purposes in low-resource areas.

Keywords: NGS; bacteria; food safety; microbial community; mobile lab.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Representative scheme of the study workflow highlighting approximate processing times for each step.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Ten most abundant bacterial genera from the composed dataset of all barcodes, represented as the relative abundance.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Bacterial composition at the genus level for all 15 investigated samples. Among the classified reads, those achieving a minimum of 1% are represented.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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