Unravelling specificities in wine yeast interactions
Résumé
The growing interest in new wine fermentation strategies, such as co-inoculating S. cerevisiae (Sc) and non-
Saccharomyces (NS) species at the beginning of fermentation, requires a better understanding of how
yeasts interact. Even though there are more and more studies on the interactions between Sc and NS
species, few data are available on interactions between NS species. Moreover, it is still unknown whether
interactions are more determined at the species or strain level. Thus, this study aims at determining the
relative importance of species and strains in the interactions between 5 wine yeast species: Hanseniaspora
uvarum (Hu), Lachancea thermotolerans (Lt), Starmerella bacillaris (Sb), Torulaspora delbrueckii (Td) and
Sc. For this, we tested all possible pair cocultures between 15 strains (3 strains for each species) and
compared their growth to monocultures. We followed the growth in synthetic must for 24 hours with a
plate reader. This way, we were able to identify four different types of growth compared to monocultures:
cases where the coculture growth was close to the average growth of both monocultures, where the
coculture growth was closer to one of the monocultures, as well as cases where the coculture was either
above or under both monocultures. This finding would indicate that in most cases coculture behaviour
does not result from the additive growth of monocultures. Besides, the type of interaction seemed to be
mainly determined at the species level whereas the strain level was mainly modulating the interaction
intensity. These results constitute a first step to a better understanding of the microbial dynamics occuring
in wine fermentation. It would then be interesting to study how these interactions develop in more
complex consortia involving higher order interactions.