Changes in the microbial communities of tiger frog (Rana tigrina) meat during refrigerated storage

Abstract

Microbial activity is the major cause of the spoilage of aquatic meat products during storage. This study investigated the changes of the microbial compositions of the tiger frog (Rana tigrina) meat stored aerobically at 4 ℃ for 12 days using the 16S rRNA amplicon high throughput sequencing (HTS) analysis. The microbial diversity and species richness of the frog meat were abundant at the initial phase of storage but decreased substantially with the prolongation of the storage time. Proteobacteria was the prevalent phylum identified from the frog meat with a relative abundance of 40.29% at day 0 increasing to 96.77% at day 6 and 95.41% at day 12, respectively. At the genus level, Shewanella, Pseudomonas, and Acinetobacter were the three dominant genera in the spoiled samples and contributed to the frog meat spoilage. Their proportions were 41.67%, 28.48%, and 5.94% at day 6, and 29.94%, 23.48%, and 18.44% at day 12, respectively. The present study is conducive to understand the pattern and process of the frog meat spoilage during refrigeration and could be used to develop efficient control measures to mitigate the predominant psychrotrophic spoilers in the aerobically stored frog meat.