Monitoring single-cell metabolic phenotyping changes of Daqu microbiota during fermentation by Raman spectroscopy.

Single-cell Raman spectroscopy with operational phenotypic units (OPUs) tracked metabolic phenotype succession in Daqu microbiota, identifying 10 OPUs and 54 sub-OPUs during fermentation.

• Why it matters: Monitoring metabolic dynamics in multi-species fermentation is difficult, and omics methods often cannot link genotype to phenotype at single-cell resolution or require destructive sampling.
• What they did: The team built an OPU-based clustering workflow for Raman spectra from a nine-member microbial community, validated by sorting representative cells and sequencing 16S/ITS regions. They then applied single-cell Raman to mixed Daqu across fermentation, correlating OPU Raman features with taxonomic annotations from sorted single cells.
• The result: The OPU-based Raman approach enabled non-destructive, rapid monitoring of single-cell metabolic phenotypes in Daqu and revealed microbial community succession linked to taxonomic differences.

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