文摘
Twenty-one natural whey starters, collected from dairy factories located in six provinces of the Grana Padano production area, were characterized. Basic techniques, such as acidity evaluation and microbial plate count, together with more complex methods such as the Live/Dead? BacLight?bacterial viability kit, have been used. Seven parameters, including pH, Soxhlet Henkel degrees, microbial plate count in Man Rogosa Sharpe medium and Whey Agar medium, together with count of total, viable and non-viable cells, have been adopted to produce sunray plots. One plot for each natural whey starter sample was obtained by characterizing the status of the microbial culture and compared with three natural whey starters prepared in the laboratory. In this way, a sunray trace is suggested to define the traits of a good natural whey starter. Another multivariate technique, principal component analysis, was applied, and it should be possible to conclude that, for this particular dataset composed of 24 objects and 7 variables, PCA allowed the highlighting of the good and bad samples, while sunray plots, even if remaining only a descriptive and explorative analysis, allowed the better visualizing of the differences among all the samples.