review · Frontiers in Microbiology
Bifidobacterium species provide essential health benefits when present in the human gut, including protection against metabolic disorders, inflammation, and gastrointestinal infections. Fermented dairy items like yogurt serve as primary carrier foods, but delivering therapeutic effects requires these organisms to remain alive until consumption. Maintaining bacterial viability throughout dairy processing and storage presents major difficulties due to multiple environmental stress factors. Methods to preserve cell survival include microencapsulation, the addition of oxygen-scavenging lactic acid bacteria, and stress-protective agents. Reliable quality assurance also demands accurate viability measurement. Traditional culture-based enumeration struggles to resolve specific probiotic strains when mixed with starter cultures. Consequently, advanced analytical tools, such as flow cytometry, propidium monoazide-quantitative polymerase chain reaction, next-generation sequencing, and single-cell Raman spectroscopy, offer promising routes to monitor viability accurately.
Probiotic foods must contain sufficient numbers of live bacteria to support digestive health and protect against infections and inflammation. Ensuring that Bifidobacterium strains survive dairy manufacturing, combined with accurate testing methods to confirm their presence, gives consumers confidence that commercial fermented foods deliver their claimed health benefits.
The findings are relevant to dairy processors and probiotic manufacturers seeking to extend product shelf life through microencapsulation and protective formulation strategies. The approaches also serve quality assurance teams looking to adopt advanced diagnostic tools, such as flow cytometry and PCR-based assays, to verify live cell counts. These technologies represent applied and near-market solutions for industrial dairy formulation and quality control testing.
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<i>Bifidobacterium</i> species are essential members of a healthy human gut microbiota. Their presence in the gut is associated with numerous health outcomes such as protection against gastrointestinal tract infections, inflammation, and metabolic diseases. Regular intake of <i>Bifidobacterium</i> in foods is a sustainable way of maintaining the health benefits associated with its use as a probiotic. Owing to their global acceptance, fermented dairy products (particularly yogurt) are considered the ideal probiotic carrier foods. As envisioned in the definition of probiotics as "live organisms," the therapeutic functionalities of <i>Bifidobacterium</i> spp. depend on maintaining their viability in the foods up to the point of consumption. However, sustaining <i>Bifidobacterium</i> spp. viability during the manufacture and shelf-life of fermented dairy products remains challenging. Hence, this paper discusses the significance of viability as a prerequisite for <i>Bifidobacterium</i> spp. probiotic functionality. The paper focuses on the stress factors that influence <i>Bifidobacterium</i> spp. viability during the manufacture and shelf life of yogurt as an archetypical fermented dairy product that is widely accepted as a delivery vehicle for probiotics. It further expounds the <i>Bifidobacterium</i> spp. physiological and genetic stress response mechanisms as well as the methods for viability retention in yogurt, such as microencapsulation, use of oxygen scavenging lactic acid bacterial strains, and stress-protective agents. The report also explores the topic of viability determination as a critical factor in probiotic quality assurance, wherein, the limitations of culture-based enumeration methods, the challenges of species and strain resolution in the presence of lactic acid bacterial starter and probiotic species are discussed. Finally, new developments and potential applications of next-generation viability determination methods such as flow cytometry, propidium monoazide-quantitative polymerase chain reaction (PMA-qPCR), next-generation sequencing, and single-cell Raman spectroscopy (SCRS) methods are examined.
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DOI: 10.3389/fmicb.2024.1327010
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