(29i) Recent Advances in the Employment of Probiotics for the Syntheses of Bacteriocins, Sugar Alcohols, Bioactive Peptides and Other Food Additives

Microbial food cultures have gained more prominence in past years regarding their potentialities in metabolizing foods, food wastes, and other biomass materials for the purification of nutraceuticals and food additives. Cultures of Aspergillus oryzae, several LAB strains, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Bacillus subtilis and Aspergillus niger are being engineered for these applications. Probiotics have been used for their proteases to proteolyze these substrates into hydrolysate fractions which are then further purified into peptide fractions by techniques such as ultrafiltration, Ion exchange chromatography, and Reverse phase HPLC (RP-HPLC) for categorization based on their molecular weights, commonly in kilodaltons. Such microbially derived peptides have been studied through several in vitro and in vivo investigations to inhibit one or more biological enzymes in the body, making them serviceable as antidiabetic and antihypertensive nutraceuticals. Relatedly, bacteriocins such as pediocin and nisin have been studied to be proteins, peptides, or protein complexes ribosomally synthesized by numerous bacterial strains, released extracellularly, and having bactericidal activities against closely related bacterial species, forging them as antimicrobial agents and food preservatives. Sugar alcohols on the other hand are metabolites of microbial cultures with relatively lower glycemic indexes, desirable organoleptic and textural arrangement which makes them workable as food sweeteners. The pedagogic and industrial exploitation of microbial cultures in the modern age lies in their formidable advantages of being natural, sustainable, and optimizable for environmental conservation. The global campaign for food manufacturing procedures involving little or no synthetic ingredients, cost-effective materials, and eco-friendly outcomes places microbial cultures as fitting panacea and suitable alternatives for these concerns.