Moreno-Zambrano Mauricio, Ullrich Matthias S, Hütt Marc-Thorsten
Department of Life Sciences and Chemistry, Jacobs University Bremen, Campus Ring 1, 28759 Bremen, Germany.
R Soc Open Sci. 2022 Feb 16;9(2):210274. doi: 10.1098/rsos.210274. eCollection 2022 Feb.
Compared with other fermentation processes in food industry, cocoa bean fermentation is uncontrolled and not standardized. A detailed mechanistic understanding can therefore be relevant for cocoa bean quality control. Starting from an existing mathematical model of cocoa bean fermentation we analyse five additional biochemical mechanisms derived from the literature. These mechanisms, when added to the baseline model either in isolation or in combination, were evaluated in terms of their capacity to describe experimental data. In total, we evaluated 32 model variants on 23 fermentation datasets. We interpret the results from two perspectives: (1) success of the potential mechanism, (2) discrimination of fermentation protocols based on estimated parameters. The former provides insight in the fermentation process itself. The latter opens an avenue towards reverse-engineering empirical conditions from model parameters. We find support for two mechanisms debated in the literature: consumption of fructose by lactic acid bacteria and production of acetic acid by yeast. Furthermore, we provide evidence that model parameters are sensitive to differences in the cultivar, temperature control and usage of steel tanks compared with wooden boxes. Our results show that mathematical modelling can provide an alternative to standard chemical fingerprinting in the interpretation of fermentation data.
与食品工业中的其他发酵过程相比，可可豆发酵是不受控制且不规范的。因此，详细的机理理解对于可可豆质量控制可能具有重要意义。从现有的可可豆发酵数学模型出发，我们分析了从文献中得出的另外五种生化机制。这些机制单独或组合添加到基线模型中时，我们根据它们描述实验数据的能力对其进行了评估。我们总共在23个发酵数据集上评估了32个模型变体。我们从两个角度解释结果：（1）潜在机制的成功程度，（2）基于估计参数对发酵方案的区分。前者有助于深入了解发酵过程本身。后者为从模型参数反向工程经验条件开辟了一条途径。我们为文献中讨论的两种机制找到了支持：乳酸菌消耗果糖和酵母产生乙酸。此外，我们提供的证据表明，与木箱相比，模型参数对品种、温度控制和钢罐使用方面的差异敏感。我们的结果表明，数学建模在发酵数据解释中可以为标准化学指纹识别提供一种替代方法。
