Flue-cured tobacco (FCT) with irritating and undesirable flavor must be aged. However, the spontaneous aging usually takes a very long time for the low efficiency. Bioaugmentation with functional strains is a promising method to reduce aging time and improve sensory quality. To eliminate the adverse effect of excessive starch or protein content on the FCT quality, we used the flow cytometry to sort Bacillus amyloliquefaciens LB with high alpha-amylase and Bacillus kochii SC with high neutral protease from the FCT microflora. The mono, co-culture of strains was performed the solid-state fermentation with FCT. Bacillus amyloliquefaciens monoculture for 2 days and Bacillus kochii monoculture for 2.5 days achieved the optimum quality. B. amyloliquefaciens–B. kochii co-culture at a ratio of 3:1 for 2 days of fermentation showed a more comprehensive quality enhancement and higher functional enzyme activity than mono-cultivation. Through OPLS-DA model (orthogonal partial least-squares-discriminant analyzes), there were 38 differential compounds between bioaugmentation samples. In co-cultivation, most of Maillard reaction products and terpenoid metabolites were at a higher level than other samples, which promoted an increase in aroma, softness and a decrease in irritation. This result validated the hypothesis of quality improvement via the co-culture. In our study, we presented a promising bioaugmentation technique for changing the sensory attributes of FCT in a short aging time.

具有刺激性和不良味道的烤烟（FCT）必须进行陈化。然而，自发老化通常需要很长的时间，效率较低。功能菌株的生物增强是一种有前途的减少老化时间和提高感官质量的方法。为了消除淀粉或蛋白质含量过高对FCT质量的不利影响，我们采用流式细胞术从FCT菌群中分选具有高α-淀粉酶的解淀粉芽孢杆菌LB和具有高中性蛋白酶的地肤芽孢杆菌SC。菌株的单一、共培养采用FCT进行固态发酵。解淀粉芽孢杆菌单独培养2天和地肤芽孢杆菌单独培养2.5天达到最佳品质。 B. amyloliquefaciens – B. kochii以3:1的比例共培养发酵2天，比单独培养表现出更全面的品质提升和更高的功能酶活性。通过 OPLS-DA 模型（正交偏最小二乘判别分析），生物增强样品之间存在 38 种差异化合物。在共培养中，大多数美拉德反应产物和萜类代谢物的水平高于其他样品，这促进了香气、柔软度的增加和刺激性的降低。这一结果验证了通过共培养提高质量的假设。在我们的研究中，我们提出了一种有前途的生物增强技术，可以在短时间内改变 FCT 的感官属性。