Assessment of the lysogenic status in the lactic acid bacterium O. oeni during the spontaneous malolactic fermentation of red wines.

After alcoholic fermentation, most wines undergo malolactic fermentation (MLF), driven by the lactic acid bacterium Oenococcus oeni, which improves their organoleptic properties and microbiological stability. Prophages were recently shown to be notably diverse and widely disseminated in O. oeni genomes. Such in silico predictions confirmed previous cultivation-based approaches which showed frequent lysis of strains upon treatment with the inducing agent mitomycin C. Both strategies used to assess lysogeny in the species were so far applied to a number of strains collected from distinct countries, wineries, cepages and fermentation processes. Results may not therefore be representative of the lysogenic population in natural communities driving the MLF during winemaking. Here we report the prevalence of lysogeny during winemaking in three wineries in the Bordeaux area. The dominant LAB population was collected in 11 red wines upon completion of MLF. Using VNTR and prophage typing analyses, our data confirm the presence of lysogens in the population driving the spontaneous MLF in all tested wines, although lysogeny rates varied across wineries. Higher prevalence of lysogeny was associated to a reduced diversity in VNTR profiles, the dominance of a few prophage-types and presence of some bacterial genetic backgrounds that were particularly prone to lysogenization.