Traditional Chinese solid-state fermented cereal starters contain highly complex microbial communities and enzymes. Very little is known, however, about the microbial dynamics related to environmental conditions, and cellulolytic communities have never been proposed to exist during cereal starter fermentation. In this study, we performed Illumina MiSeq sequencing combined with PCR-denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis to investigate microbiota, coupled with clone library construction to trace cellulolytic communities in both fermentation stages. A succession of microbial assemblages was observed during the fermentation of starters. Lactobacillales and Saccharomycetales dominated the initial stages, with a continuous decline in relative abundance. However, thermotolerant and drought-resistant Bacillales , Eurotiales , and Mucorales were considerably accelerated during the heating stages, and these organisms dominated until the end of fermentation. Enterobacteriales were consistently ubiquitous throughout the process. For the cellulolytic communities, only the genera Sanguibacter , Beutenbergia , Agrobacterium , and Erwinia dominated the initial fermentation stages. In contrast, stages at high incubation temperature induced the appearance and dominance of Bacillus , Aspergillus , and Mucor . The enzymatic dynamics of amylase and glucoamylase also showed a similar trend, with the activities clearly increased in the first 7 days and subsequently decreased until the end of fermentation. Furthermore, β-glucosidase activity continuously and significantly increased during the fermentation process. Evidently, cellulolytic potential can adapt to environmental conditions by changes in the community structure during the fermentation of starters.

Vineyard soil microbial communities potentially mediate grapevine growth, grape production as well as wine terroir. Simultaneously assessing shifts of microbial community composition at the intra-vineyard scale allows us to decouple correlations among environmental variables, thus providing insights into vineyard management. Here we investigated bacterial and fungal community compositions and their relationships with edaphic properties in soils collected from a commercial vineyard at four different soil depths (0–5, 5–10, 10–20, and 20–40 cm). Soil organic carbon (SOC) content, invertase activity and phosphatase activity decreased along depth gradient in the 0–20 cm soil fraction (P < 0.001). The soil bacterial biomass and α-diversity were significantly higher than those of fungi (P ≤ 0.001). Statistical analyses revealed that SOC content, pH, C/N ratio and total phosphorus (TP) were significant determinants of soil bacterial (R = 0.494, P = 0.001) and fungal (R = 0.443, P = 0.001) community structure. The abundance of dominated bacterial phyla (Proteobacteria, Acidobacteria and Actinobacteria) and fungal phyla (Ascomycota, Zygomycota and Basidiomycota) slightly varied among all soil samples. Genus Lactococcus, which comprised 2.72% of the soil bacterial community, showed increasing pattern with depth. Importantly, Candidatus Nitrososphaera, Monographella and Fusarium were also detected with high abundances in soil samples, indicating their ecological function in soil nitrogen cycle and the potential risk in grapevine disease. Overall, this work detected the intra-vineyard variation of bacterial and fungal communities and their relationships with soil characteristics, which was beneficial to vineyard soil management and grapevine disease prevention.