A REVIEW OF POSTBIOTICS AS NEW HEALTH PROMOTERS

Abstract

For a long time, probiotics have been widely used as safe microorganisms that can confers a health benefit effects on the host, directly or indirectly. Recently, postbiotics have gained interest as new health promoters. Postbiotics have recently been defined as complex mixture of functional bioactive compounds secreted by probiotics during a fermentation process (such as biosurfactants, proteins, short chain fatty acids, organic acids, bacteriocins, vitamins etc.). According to current data, postbiotics have advantages over live probiotics with regard to: ease extraction, standardization, and storage, availability for industrial-scale-up, specific mechanism of action, impossible to transfer and acquire antibiotic resistance genes and their interaction with the cellular receptors to trigger the targeted responses. However, several aspects related to postbiotics have not been fully elucidated. Here, we provided a critical review of the postbiotic definition, mechanisms of action, underlying their beneficial effects, as well as current trends for applications in foods and pharmaceuticals.