Effect of curing method on the phytochemical, microbial composition and bioactivity of vanilla planifolia

This study aimed to evaluate the effect of different killing treatments during Vanilla planifolia curing in terms of phenolic compound composition and, microbial populations through untargeted metabolomics, and metagenomics approach; and bioactivity in 3T3-L1 cell model. The killing treatments were microwave, hot water immersion, sonication and freezing, followed by traditional curing steps. The microwave killing treatment promoted the greatest differences in phenolic profiles, including tentatively identified vanillic acid, vanillin, glucovanillin, etc. A PLS-DA model showed that thermal treatments were clustered. Bacillus was the most representative genus. The killing treatment with the highest α-diversity was hot water immersion and sonication. This study suggests potential correlations between microbial genera such as Bacillus, Klebsiella and Staphylococcus with the presence of phenolic compounds from vanilla. At 0.25 mg/ml of the vanilla extract concentration, were obtained higher percentages in cell viability, lower percentages of adipogenesis percentages and lower glycerol release. Killing methods has significant effect on bacteria proportion, resulting in an improvement in vanilla products. Future studies could include upscaling of the killing methods and having more information on the bioactivity of the 4 vanilla extracts subjected into different killing treatments.