Abstract: In order to understand the changes in fungal species during the fermentation and drying of hand-made Fu brick tea, the fungal diversity at different times of fermentation (0, 4, 8 and 12 d) and drying (17 and 22 d) was analyzed using Illumina MiSeq high-throughput sequencing. The results showed that the fungal community was diverse during the early fermentation stage, but this diversity exhibited an overall declining trend as fermentation and drying proceeded?successively. After sequencing and data cleansing, a total of 990 522 valid Tags were obtained. After clustering, there were 186 operational taxonomic units (OTUs), which were annotated to 5 phyla, 14 classes, 29 orders, 47 families and 65 genera. Among all time points, the highest diversity of fungi was observed on fermentation day 0, and Aspergillus showed the highest relative abundance (40.59%), followed by Debaryomyces, Eurotium and Penicillium. However, Eurotium was the absolutely dominant genus at the other five time points. Its relative abundance reached 97.27% on fermentation day 4, and the average relative abundance of these five time points was 98.81%. In this study, accurate and detailed nalysis of the changes in the bacterial community structure and diversity during the fermentation and drying of hand-made Fu brick tea was achieved using Illumina MiSeq sequencing, which will provide a new idea for improving the processing of hand-made Fu brick tea and for understanding the underlying mechanism.

Key words: hand-made Fu brick tea, Illumina MiSeq technology, fungal community diversity