Penicillium camemberti: a history of domestication on cheese

The white, fluffy layer that covers Camembert is made of a mould resulting from human selection, similar to the way dogs were domesticated from wolves. A collaboration involving French scientists from the CNRS* has shown, through genomic analyses and laboratory experiments, that the mould Penicillium camemberti is the result of a domestication process that took place in several stages. According to their work, a first domestication event resulted in the blue-green mould P. biforme, which is used, for example, for making fresh goat’s cheese. A second, more recent domestication event resulted in the white and fluffy P. camemberti. Both domesticated species show advantageous characteristics for maturing cheese compared to the wild, closely related species: they are whiter and grow faster in cheese-ripening cellar conditions. In addition, they do not produce, or only in very small quantities, a toxin that is potentially dangerous to humans; they also prevent the proliferation of undesirable moulds. This research, published on 24th September in

Current Biology

, may have an impact on cheese production, by steering the selection of moulds according to the desired characteristics.

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* The study involved scientists from the Ecology, Systematics and Evolution laboratory (CNRS/Université Paris-Saclay/AgroParisTech) and the Biodiversity and Microbial Ecology laboratory (Université de Brest, Plouzané).