Albert Mas

Albert Mas
Universidad Rovira i Virgili | URV · Department of Biochemistry and Biotechnology

Professor

About

372
Publications
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10,365
Citations

Publications

Publications (372)
Article
Full-text available
The revalorization of by-products is a priority for sustainable winemaking. This study explores the potential of white grape marc as a raw material for producing a kombucha-style beverage. We compared the fermentation processes of traditional tea kombuchas (green and black) and grape marc kombucha (Grape-K), all fermented with a homemade Symbiotic...
Article
Adaptive Laboratory Evolution (ALE) of microorganisms can improve the efficiency of sustainable industrial processes important to the global economy. However, stochasticity and genetic background effects often lead to suboptimal outcomes during laboratory evolution. Here we report an ALE platform to circumvent these shortcomings through parallelize...
Article
Full-text available
Controlling the microorganisms involved in alcoholic fermentation during wine production can be achieved by adding a small quantity of spontaneously fermenting must to freshly crushed grapes, a technique known as pied de cuve (PdC). This method not only serves as an inoculation starter but also enhances the microbial footprint unique to each wine r...
Article
Full-text available
This study explores the biological mechanisms behind colour changes in white wine fermentation using different strains of Starmerella bacillaris. We combined food engineering, genomics, machine learning, and physicochemical analyses to examine interactions between S. bacillaris and Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Significant differences in total polyphen...
Article
Full-text available
Climate change is posing a major challenge to the wine industry, with rising alcohol levels emerging as an issue of concern affecting quality, economics and health. This study explores two methods to reduce alcohol content in Chardonnay wines from Chile. Firstly, 5% and 10% of water was added to grape must. Secondly, the sequential inoculation of M...
Article
Full-text available
Adaptive evolution under controlled laboratory conditions has been highly effective in selecting organisms with beneficial phenotypes such as stress tolerance. The evolution route is particularly attractive when the organisms are either difficult to engineer or the genetic basis of the phenotype is complex. However, many desired traits, like metabo...
Chapter
Wine production has been performed during most of the recent history of humanity. Yeasts are the primary players involved in the transformation of grape must into wine, and the need for proper control of fermentation requires good microbiological knowledge and appropriate tools to monitor the process. The primary task of microorganisms in nature is...
Article
The current use of non-Saccharomyces yeasts in mixed fermentations increases the relevance of the interactions between yeast species. In this work, the interactions between Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Torulaspora delbrueckii were analyzed. For this purpose, fermentations with and without contact between strains of those yeast species were performe...
Preprint
Full-text available
Adaptive Laboratory Evolution (ALE) of microbes can improve the efficiency of sustainable industrial processes important to the global economy, but chance and genetic background effects often lead to suboptimal outcomes. Here we report an ALE platform to circumvent these flaws through parallelized clonal evolution at an unprecedented scale. Using t...
Article
A complex consortium of yeasts is the principal responsible of wine fermentation, being Saccharomyces cerevisiae the main driver. The use of selected yeast, beginning with Saccharomyces strains, is one of the main achievements in microbiological control in the wine industry. However, the use of single strain starters of S. cerevisiae and the limite...
Chapter
Wine making has evolved since its origins in the Caucasus more than 8000 years ago to a modern scientific and technological discipline. Novel methodologies and practices have been implemented continuously in the elaboration of wines. The industry has been normally keen to accept those developments and incorporate them into their protocols. However,...
Article
Full-text available
During alcoholic fermentation, Saccharomyces cerevisiae is subjected to several stresses, among which ethanol is of capital importance. Melatonin, a bioactive molecule synthesized by yeast during alcoholic fermentation, has an antioxidant role and is proposed to contribute to counteracting fermentation-associated stresses. The aim of this study was...
Preprint
Traits lacking fitness benefit cannot be directly selected for under Darwinian evolution. Thus, features such as metabolite secretion are currently inaccessible to adaptive laboratory evolution. Here, we utilize environment-dependency of trait correlations to enable Darwinian selection of fitness-neutral or costly traits. We use metabolic models to...
Article
Full-text available
Microbiological strategies are currently being considered as methods for reducing the ethanol content of wine. Fermentations started with a multistarter of three non-Saccharomyces yeasts (Metschnikowia pulcherrima (Mp), Torulaspora delbrueckii (Td) and Zygosaccharomyces bailii (Zb)) at different inoculum concentrations. S. cerevisiae (Sc) was inocu...
Article
Brettanomyces bruxellensis is the most reported spoilage yeast in aged wines mainly due to the production of phenolic off-flavors. In the present study, 64 B. bruxellensis strains isolated from Catalonian ageing wines were genetically and physiologically evaluated. The B. bruxellensis strains had high intraspecific diversity and were distributed ge...
Article
Full-text available
Alcoholic fermentation and the production of wine has accompanied humanity for more than 10000 years. However, it has been only in the last 50 years when the winemakers have had the tools to manage and control the process. The methodology to analyze and monitor the succession of the microorganisms that participate in the process along with the effe...
Article
Full-text available
Melatonin is a ubiquitous indolamine that plays important roles in various aspects of biological processes in mammals. In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, melatonin has been reported to exhibit antioxidant properties and to modulate the expression of some genes involved in endogenous defense systems. The aim of this study was to elucidate the role of supp...
Article
Full-text available
The use of controlled mixed inocula of Saccharomyces cerevisiae and non-Saccharomyces yeasts is a common practice in winemaking, with Torulaspora delbrueckii, Lachancea thermotolerans and Metschnikowia pulcherrima being the most commonly used non-Saccharomyces species. Although S. cerevisiae is usually the dominant yeast at the end of mixed ferment...
Article
Full-text available
Wine aged in barrels or bottles is susceptible to alteration by microorganisms that affect the final product quality. However, our knowledge of the microbiota during aging and the factors modulating the microbial communities is still quite limited. The present work uses high-throughput sequencing (HTS) techniques to deal with the meta-taxonomic cha...
Article
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Benzenoids are compounds associated with floral and fruity flavours in flowers, fruits and leaves and present a role in hormonal signalling in plants. These molecules are produced by the phenyl ammonia lyase pathway. However, some yeasts can also synthesize them from aromatic amino acids using an alternative pathway that remains unknown. Hanseniasp...
Article
Full-text available
Melatonin is a bioactive compound that is present in fermented beverages and has been described to be synthesized by yeast during alcoholic fermentation. The aim of this study was to assess the capacity of intracellular and extracellular melatonin production by different Saccharomyces strains from diverse food origin and to study the effects of dif...
Article
Full-text available
The alcohol content in wine has increased due to external factors in recent decades. In recent reports, some non-Saccharomyces yeast species have been confirmed to reduce ethanol during the alcoholic fermentation process. Thus, an efficient screening of non-Saccharomyces yeasts with low ethanol yield is required due to the broad diversity of these...
Article
Full-text available
Non-Saccharomyces yeasts have long been considered spoilage microorganisms. Currently, oenological interest in those species is increasing, mostly due to their positive contribution to wine quality. In this work, the fermentative capacity and nitrogen consumption of several non-Saccharomyces wine yeast (Torulaspora delbrueckii, Lachancea thermotole...
Chapter
The strawberry is a much appreciated fruit by virtue of its nutritional properties and alleged healthy effects, and its production has grown steadily over recent decades. However, its instability in seasonal markets, high perishability, and stringent quality criteria can lead to substantial surpluses with highly adverse impacts on social and econom...
Article
Full-text available
Brettanomyces bruxellensis is the main wine spoiler yeast all over the world, yet the structure of the populations associated with winemaking remains elusive. In this work, we considered 1411 wine isolates from 21 countries that were genotyped using twelve microsatellite markers. We confirmed that B. bruxellensis isolates from wine environments sho...
Article
Full-text available
We used barcoded sequencing to analyze the eukaryotic population in the grape berries at different ripening states in four Australian vineyards. Furthermore, we used an innovative compositional data analysis for assessing the diversity of microbiome communities. The novelty was the introduction of log-ratio balances between the detected genera. Alt...
Article
Melatonin is an indole amine that interacts with some proteins in mammals, such as calreticulin, calmodulin or sirtuins. In yeast, melatonin is synthetized and interacts with glycolytic proteins during alcoholic fermentation in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Due to its importance as an antioxidant molecule in both Saccharomyces and non-Saccharomyces yea...
Article
Full-text available
Melatonin is a bioactive compound that is present in fermented beverages and synthesized by yeast during alcoholic fermentation. Many studies have shown that melatonin interacts with some mammalian proteins, such as sirtuins or orphan receptor family proteins. The aim of this study was to determine the intracellular synthesis profile of melatonin i...
Article
Stuck and sluggish fermentations are among the main problems in winemaking industry leading to important economic losses. Several factors have been described as causes of stuck and sluggish fermentations, being exposure to extreme temperatures barely studied. The objective of this study was to identify thermal conditions leading to stuck and sluggi...
Preprint
Full-text available
Brettanomyces bruxellensis is the main wine spoiler yeast all over the world, yet the structuration of the populations associated with winemaking remains elusive. In this work, we considered 1411 wine isolates from 21 countries that were genotyped using twelve microsatellite markers. We confirmed that B. bruxellensis isolates from wine environments...
Article
Full-text available
Melatonin is a bioactive compound that is present in fermented beverages, such as wine and beer, at concentrations ranging from picograms to nanograms per mL of product. The purpose of this study was to optimize a novel fluorescent bioassay for detecting melatonin based on a cell line that contains the human melatonin receptor 1B gene and to compar...
Article
Full-text available
Metataxonomic analysis represents a fast and cost-effective approach for acquiring informative insight into the composition of the microbiome of samples with variable diversity, such as wine samples. Nevertheless, it comprises a vast amount of laboratory procedures and bioinformatic frameworks each one associated with an inherent variability of pro...
Article
Full-text available
There is increasing interest in the use of non-Saccharomyces yeasts in winemaking due to their positive attributes. The non-Saccharomyces yeast Hanseniaspora vineae is an apiculate yeast that has been associated with the production of wine with good fermentation capacity and an increase in aromatic properties. However, this yeast represents a conce...
Article
Full-text available
Flavour and some compounds associated with wine colour are known to be yeast strain-dependent. These metabolites are important for the sensory quality of wines, studies searching for increase aroma and color are a key area today in winemaking. The aim of this work was to study the oenological potential of the two main strains of Hanseniaspora vinea...
Article
Full-text available
The huge diversity of non- Saccharomyces yeasts in grapes is dominated by the apiculate genus Hanseniaspora . Two native strains of Hanseniaspora vineae applied to winemaking because of their high oenological potential in aroma and fermentation performance were selected to obtain high-quality genomes. Here, we present a phylogenetic analysis and th...
Article
Oxidative stress is a common stress in yeasts during the stages of the winemaking process in which aerobic growth occurs, and it can modify the cellular lipid composition. The aim of this study was to evaluate the oxidative stress tolerance of two non-conventional yeasts (Torulaspora delbrueckii and Metschnikowia pulcherrima) compared to Saccharomy...
Article
During wine fermentation, yeasts produce metabolites that are known growth regulators. The relationship between certain higher alcohols derived from aromatic amino acid metabolism and yeast signalling has previously been reported. In the present work, tryptophol (TrpOH) or melatonin (MEL), which are putative growth regulators, were added to alcohol...
Article
Full-text available
Melatonin (N-acetyl-5-methoxytryptamine) is synthesized from tryptophan by Saccharomyces cerevisiae and non-conventional yeast species. Antioxidant properties have been suggested as a possible role of melatonin in a S. cerevisiae wine strain. However, the possible antioxidant melatonin effect on non-Saccharomyces species and other strains of S. cer...
Article
The main losses in viticulture around the world are normally associated with rotten grapes affecting both the chemical composition and the grape microbiota that later might affect the alcoholic fermentation. We analyzed the population in musts obtained from sour rotten, botrytized and healthy Macabeo grapes and the population dynamics during the sp...
Article
Full-text available
Yeasts secrete a large diversity of compounds during alcoholic fermentation, which affect growth rates and developmental processes, like filamentous growth. Several compounds are produced during aromatic amino acid metabolism, including aromatic alcohols, serotonin, melatonin, and tryptamine. We evaluated the effects of these compounds on growth pa...
Article
Aromatic alcohols (tryptophol, phenylethanol, tyrosol) positively contribute to organoleptic characteristics of wines, and are also described as bioactive compounds and quorum sensing molecules. These alcohols are produced by yeast during alcoholic fermentation via the Erhlich pathway, although in non-Saccharomyces this production has been poorly s...
Article
During wine production, some yeasts enter a Viable But Not Culturable (VBNC) state, which may influence the quality and stability of the final wine through remnant metabolic activity or by resuscitation. Culture-independent techniques are used for obtaining an accurate estimation of the number of live cells, and quantitative PCR could be the most a...
Article
Full-text available
In wine industry, there is a prevalent use of starter cultures to promote a controlled and efficient alcoholic fermentation preventing the growth of spoilage microbes. However, current trends in enology aim to combine the guaranteed success of monitored process and the complexity of fermentations either by inoculating autochthonous starters or by p...
Chapter
Acetic acid bacteria (AAB) are considered one of the most common wine spoilage microorganisms and a threat for the oenologists. Their ability to transform most of the sugars and alcohols into organic acids produces easily the transformation of glucose into gluconic acid in damaged grapes and ethanol or glycerol into acetic acid or dihydroxyacetone...
Article
Full-text available
The use of non-Saccharomyces yeast for wine making is becoming a common trend in many innovative wineries. The application is normally aimed at increasing aromas, glycerol, reducing acidity, and other improvements. This manuscript focuses on the reproduction of the native microbiota from the vineyard in the inoculum. Thus, native selected yeasts (H...
Article
Three vineyard strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, P301.4, P304.4 and P254.12, were assayed in comparison with a commercial industrial strain, QA23. The aim was to understand if nitrogen availability could influence strain competition ability during must fermentation. Pairwise-strain fermentations and co-fermentations with the simultaneous presenc...
Article
Full-text available
Melatonin (N-acetyl-5-methoxytryptamine), which is synthesized from tryptophan, is formed during alcoholic fermentation, though its role in yeast is unknown. This study employed Saccharomyces cerevisiae as an eukaryote model to evaluate the possible effects of melatonin supplementation on endogenous cellular defense systems by measuring its effects...
Article
Full-text available
In yeast, ethanol is produced as a by-product of fermentation through glycolysis. Ethanol also stimulates a developmental foraging response called filamentous growth and is thought to act as a quorum-sensing molecule. Ethanol-inducible filamentous growth was examined in a small collection of wine/European strains, which validated ethanol as an indu...
Article
Full-text available
Hybridization is known to improve complex traits due to heterosis and phenotypic robustness. However, these phenomena have been rarely explained at the molecular level. Here, the genetic determinism of Saccharomyces cerevisiae fermentation performance was investigated using a QTL-mapping approach on an F1-progeny population. Three main QTLs were de...
Article
Wine spoilage is an important concern for winemakers to preserve the quality of their final product and avoid contamination throughout the production process. The use of sulphur dioxide (SO2) is highly recommended to prevent wine spoilage due to its antimicrobial activity. However, SO2 has a limited effect on the viability of acetic acid bacteria (...
Chapter
This book, written by leading international authorities in the field, covers all the basic and applied aspects of acetic acid bacteria. It describes the importance of acetic acid bacteria in food industry by giving information on the microbiological properties of fermented foods as well as production procedures. Special attention is given to vinega...
Chapter
Vinegar is the result of a double fermentation process (alcoholic fermentation followed by acetification) starting from any edible carbohydrate-rich source. It is widely consumed as a condiment and ingredient in different food formulations and recipes (sauces, marinades, dressings). The variety of vinegars in the market is relevant and new products...
Article
Full-text available
Fermentation processes have proceeded without microbiological control until starter cultures came up in 19th Century. However, in some processes, such as wine making a widespread use of starter cultures did not come up until the end of the 20th Century, when the cellar-friendly active dry wine yeast (ADWY) were available. However, this practice was...
Article
Vinegar is the result of the double fermentation (alcoholic and acetic) of a sugary substrate. Vinegar has a very broad application due to the high acidity derived from its main component, acetic acid. It is used as a food preservative and a cooking condiment, although in many countries, it is used by itself in salads, in sauces such as vinaigrette...
Article
Full-text available
The inoculation of wines with autochthonous yeast allows obtaining complex wines with a peculiar microbial footprint characteristic from a wine region. Mixed inoculation of non-Saccharomyces yeasts and S. cerevisiae is of interest for the wine industry for technological and sensory reasons. However, the interactions between these yeasts are not wel...
Article
Acetic acid bacteria (AAB) are a group of microorganisms highly used in the food industry. However, its use can be limited by the insufficient information known about the nutritional requirements of AAB for optimal growth. The aim of this work was to study the effects of different concentrations and sources of nitrogen on the growth of selected AAB...
Article
Full-text available
The alcoholic fermentation of grape musts to wines is a rather complex process that involves the sequential development of microorganisms, mainly yeasts, but also filamentous fungi, lactic acid bacteria, etc. In the early stages of wine fermentation, several yeast species may be present but, as the alcohol concentration increases, Saccharomyces spe...
Article
Full-text available
Acetic acid bacteria (AAB) are known for rapid and incomplete oxidation of an extensively variety of alcohols and carbohydrates, resulting in the accumulation of organic acids as the final products. These oxidative fermentations in AAB are catalyzed by PQQ- or FAD- dependent membrane-bound dehydrogenases. In the present study, the enzyme activity o...