Batch spontaneous anaerobic fermentation of ginger: time axis analysis of population dynamics and microbial diversity

Ginger (Zingeber officinale) has lot of promising benefits especially for medicinal purposes. Naturally, fungi and bacteria can live on the outer skin of ginger as it grow on the soil and these microbe can be both aerobic and anaerobic. If ginger let to rot naturally, it will break into its basic elements by enzyme that is secreted by fungi. The enzymes will break the skin, followed by aerobic bacteria degrading it to its basic elements. However if ginger consumed by humans or other living creatures, the anaerobic microbes will be digested in the alimentary canal into bioavailable products which are readily absorbed by the body. This anaerobic fermentation in the gut can be approximated by spontaneous anaerobic fermentation of ginger to produce bioavailable products to be consumed by humans for their health benefits. In this research, the batch spontaneous fermentation of ginger is characterized by tracking the microbial diversity and population dynamics along time axis. This will create the basis for precise identification of the species in further advanced work. Together with the metabolite profile, microbial diversity and population dynamics profiles will form the basis for quality control and scale up for this fermentation. To achieve these goal, the steps that need to be carried out on each sample are serial dilutions, streaking on each agar plate with the selective media MRS, Urea, and Mac Conkey agar, incubation, colony counting, gram staining, gram staining and finally identification of cell morphology and plotting of species diversity and community dynamics. 31 batch spontaneous anaerobic fermentations of 10%(w/v) sucrose and 10%(w/v) grinded ginger in distilled water of volume 500ml were carried out for 12 weeks. Samples were taken on days 2,3,4,5,7,8,10,14,15, and week 3,4,5, 6, 7,8,9,10,11,12. After carrying out the above steps, the results shows that selected microbe that grows on each agar especially on selective medium has its own population dynamics along the time axis. Superimposing the population dynamics time-profile of each selected