Enhanced Storage of Anaerobic Bacteria through Polymeric Encapsulation

Surface engineering as a potential strategy to enhance desiccation tolerance of beneficial bacteria

Desiccation can diminish the viability of beneficial bacteria by over 90%, threatening their effectiveness in agricultural productivity and probiotic applications. Bacterial surface engineering, already proven to combat acidic environments and oxidative damage, offers promising avenues for mitigating desiccation stress. This Perspective explores and adapts these approaches-spanning bioinspired coatings, encapsulation methods, and nanotechnology-to significantly improve bacterial survival under dehydration. By slowing water loss, preserving membrane integrity, and minimizing oxidative damage, surface engineering paves the way for scalable and effective strategies to bolster bacterial resilience in demanding environments.

Benefits and Challenges of Encapsulating Bifidobacterium Probiotic Strains with Bifidogenic Prebiotics

Bifidobacteria offer remarkable health benefits when added to probiotic formulations, contributing to the burgeoning market driven by increased awareness among consumers and healthcare providers. However, several pivotal challenges must be crossed: strain selection, encapsulation wall materials, compatible food matrices, and the intricate interplay among these factors. An approach to address these challenges involves exploring bifidogenic substrates as potential encapsulation materials. This strategy has the potential to enhance bifidobacteria viability within the demanding gastrointestinal environment, extend shelf life, and promote synergistic interactions that promote bifidobacteria survival. Nonetheless, it is crucial to acknowledge that the relationship between bifidogenic substrates and bifidobacterial metabolism is complex and multifaceted. Consequently, despite the promising outlook, it is important to emphasize that this approach requires in-depth investigation, as the intricate interplay between these elements constitutes a rich area of ongoing research. This pursuit aims to ultimately deliver consumers a product that can genuinely improve their health and well-being.

Intestinal Delivery of Probiotics: Materials, Strategies, and Applications

Probiotics with diverse and crucial properties and functions have attracted broad interest from many researchers, who adopt intestinal delivery of probiotics to modulate the gut microbiota. However, the major problems faced for the therapeutic applications of probiotics are the viability and colonization of probiotics during their processing, oral intake, and subsequent delivery to the gut. The challenges of simple oral delivery (stability, controllability, targeting, etc.) have greatly limited the use of probiotics in clinical therapies. Nanotechnology can endow the probiotics to be delivered to the intestine with improved survival rate and increased resistance to the adverse environment. Additionally, the progress in synthetic biology has created new opportunities for efficiently and purposefully designing and manipulating the probiotics. In this article, a brief overview of the types of probiotics for intestinal delivery, the current progress of different probiotic encapsulation strategies, including the chemical, physical, and genetic strategies and their combinations, and the emerging single-cell encapsulation strategies using nanocoating methods, is presented. The action mechanisms of probiotics that are responsible for eliciting beneficial effects are also briefly discussed. Finally, the therapeutic applications of engineered probiotics are discussed, and the future trends toward developing engineered probiotics with advanced features and improved health benefits are proposed.

Novel delivery systems for controlled release of bacterial therapeutics

As more is learned about the benefits of microbes, their potential to prevent and treat disease is expanding. Microbial therapeutics are less burdensome and costly to produce than traditional molecular drugs, often with superior efficacy. Yet, as with most medicines, controlled dosing and delivery to the area of need remain key challenges for microbes. Advances in materials to control small-molecule delivery are expected to translate to microbes, enabling similar control with equivalent benefits. In this perspective, recent advances in living biotherapeutics are discussed within the context of new methods for their controlled release. The integration of these advances provides a roadmap for the design, synthesis, and analysis of controlled microbial therapeutic delivery systems.