Diversity of the bacterial community found in samma-narezushi (saury narezushi) revealed by the 16S rRNA gene clone library.

Narezushi is one of Japanese traditional foods and is made by fermenting salted fish meat and cooked rice together. In this study, the microbial diversity of samma-narezushi (narezushi using saury, Cobolabis saira) was analyzed by the 16S ribosomal RNA gene (rDNA) clone library. Randomly selected 89 clones were sequenced and phylogenetically analyzed. The sequences were classified into 12 operational taxonomy units (OTUs) at the 97% identity threshold. Most of the clones (89%) were lactic acid bacteria (LAB) and included Lactobacillus sakei, Leuconostoc gelidum, Lactococcus lactis subsp. lactis and L. pisium. The most predominant clone was L. sakei at 72% of the clones. The second most abundant clone was L. gelidum. These results suggest that L. sakei mainly contributes to the lactic acid fermentation process, taste and flavor of samma-narezushi. The present study showed that the culture independent method is useful for the microbial diversity analysis of narezushi.