Environmental contributors to bacterially dominated fermenting consortia of artisanal Mezcal
Patricia Alejandra Becerra-Lucio, Ernesto Pérez-Rueda, Graciela Maria Dias, Natalia Ysabel Labrín-Sotomayor, Artemio Mendoza-Mendoza, Laila Pamela Partida-Martínez, Eugenia Zarza, Yuri Jorge Peña-Ramírez · 2026
Read Environmental contributors to bacterially dominated fermenting consortia of artisanal Mezcal by Patricia Alejandra Becerra-Lucio, Ernesto Pérez-Rueda, Graciela Maria Dias, Natalia Ysabel Labrín-Sotomayor, Artemio Mendoza-Mendoza, Laila Pamela Partida-Martínez, Eugenia Zarza, Yuri Jorge Peña-Ramírez (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13474767.txt.
Description
Becerra-Lucio and co-authors traced the microbes of artisanal mezcal from agave field to final spirit, using shotgun gene surveys on four production batches. The goal was to learn where a wild fermentation's workforce actually comes from. Their 2026 study sampled plants, environment, equipment, and the fermenting must itself across the whole process.
Bacteria, not yeasts, ran the fermentation: Leuconostoc and Lentilactobacillus dominated the vats while the classic fermenter Saccharomyces made up only about 10% of the microbial share. The phylum Bacillota exceeded 60% of the community at every stage. Community structure barely shifted between batches, depths, or fermentation times. Agave weevils, an insect pest of the crop, carried the same dominant bacteria as the ferments, marking them as plausible natural reservoirs that seed each batch. Microbial functional shifts tracked the flavor notes expert tasters recorded.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Patricia Alejandra Becerra-Lucio, Ernesto Pérez-Rueda, Graciela Maria Dias, Natalia Ysabel Labrín-Sotomayor, Artemio Mendoza-Mendoza, Laila Pamela Partida-Martínez, Eugenia Zarza, Yuri Jorge Peña-Ramírez |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 59 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |