## 1 Introduction  
The geographical origin of fermented foods plays an important role in conferring cultural and gastronomic meanings as well as in influencing certain product characteristics [1; 2; 3]. Naturally fermented dairy products, for instance, have been part of the culinary heritage of many communities throughout the world, showcasing a rich microbial species diversity that is linked to their origin [4]. Similarly, European fermented meat products often provide explicit references to geography [5], which parallels differences in fermentative microbiota [6]. The fermentative microorganisms consist primarily of lactic acid bacteria (LAB) and coagulase-negative staphylococci (CNS). Although many distinctive regional practices exist, key differences in processing can often be reduced to discrepancies in processing between Northern and Southern Europe [7; 8]. North-European fermented meat products are usually subjected to a faster fermentation at higher temperatures, leading to a more acid (pH of 5.0 or lower) product than is the case for South-European variants [9]. They also habitually rely on a smoking step that prevents molding, whereas fermented meats in Southern Europe are commonly typified by desirable molding and extensive maturation [2; 8; 10; 11]. Such distinct differences in processing are known to influence the growth and composition of the predominant LAB and CNS communities [6]. For instance, CNS communities in South-European fermented meats are dominated by _Staphylococcus xylosus_ and _Staphylococcus equorum_, whereas in Northern Europe there is typically a much higher prevalence of _Staphylococcus carnosus_[6; 8; 12; 13; 14; 15]. Furthermore, as most fermented sausages are currently produced on an industrial scale, LAB and CNS communities are also heavily influenced by potential starter culture application, which in the case of LAB mostly consists of _Latilactobacillus sakei_ and _Pediococcus pentosaceus_ and in the case of CNS is limited to _S. xylosus_ and/or _S. carnosus_[16; 17; 18]. In contrast, in traditional fermented sausages, fermentation occurs spontaneously by microorganisms originating from the meat and production environment [19; 20]. Depending on the applied processing conditions, traditional fermented sausages can support a much broader CNS species diversity, with _S. equorum_, _Staphylococcus saprophtivicus_, and _S. xylosus_ being the most prevalent species [17; 21]. Culture-dependent as well as culture-independent identification methods have been used to study the bacterial communities of fermented meats [10; 22; 23]. The former has several disadvantages, as they are often biased towards certain microorganisms because of the selective media and growth conditions used and their inability to recover microorganisms that are less numerically abundant or in a viable but non-cultivable state [23; 24]. The latter generally offers a more complete view of the microbiota present, although methods such as denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis of targeted PCR amplicons (PCR-DGGE) can suffer from several drawbacks, such as being labor-intensive, time-consuming, and offering low resolution [23; 25]. Recently, culture-independent high-throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies have been applied to analyze microbial communities in fermented foods, including fermented meats, in greater detail [26; 27; 28]. For this purpose, several studies have relied on the sequencing of one or more hypervariable region(s) of the 16S rRNA gene [25; 29]. However, the 16S rRNA gene cannot be used to distinguish between different species within the _Staphylococcus_ genus. It is, therefore, necessary to apply other phylogenetic marker genes, such as the _rpoB_ or _tuf_ gene, when analyzing diverse staphylococcal communities [30; 31; 32]. The objective of this study was to assess if a previously developed amplicon-based HTS method targeting the 16S rRNA and _tuf_ genes [33] can be successfully applied to chart the bacterial communities in European fermented meats.