4. Building cheese microbial communities

4.1 Successive colonization of microbial groups

During the transformation of milk into curds and then ripened cheese, three waves of microbial populations follow one another under the influence of biotic and abiotic factors (figure 6 ):

• during the first day of production, when the milk coagulates, acidifying lactic acid bacteria, in particular the mesophilic Lactococcus lactis and the thermophilic Streptococcus thermophilus, develop, reaching over a billion cells per gram of cheese. They play a key role in transforming lactose, milk's only sugar, into lactic acid, causing the environment...