Unraveling the world of halophilic and halotolerant bacteria in cheese by combining cultural, genomic and metagenomic approaches.

Halophilic/halotolerant bacteria are generally assumed to live in natural environments, although they may also be found in foods such as cheese and seafood. These salt-loving bacteria have been occasionally characterized in cheese, and studies on their ecological and technological functions are still scarce. We therefore selected 13 traditional cheeses to systematically characterize these microorganisms in their rinds via cultural, genomic and metagenomic methods.