Abstract
Probiotic bacteria offer a number of potential health benefits when administered in sufficient amounts that in part include reducing the number of harmful organisms in the intestine, producing antimicrobial substances and stimulating the body’s immune response. However, precisely elucidating the probiotic effect of a specific bacterium has been challenging due to the complexity of the gut’s microbial ecosystem and a lack of definitive means for its characterization. This review provides an overview of widely used and recently described probiotics, their impact on the human’s gut microflora as a preventative treatment of disease, human/animal models being used to help show efficacy, and discusses the potential use of probiotics in gastrointestinal diseases associated with antibiotic administration.
Highlights
Microbial Ecology of the Human Gastrointestinal TractThe human intestinal microbiota is a complex ecosystem with considerable impact on human health and well-being, contributing to maturation of the immune system and providing a direct barrier against pathogen colonization (Doré and Corthier, 2010)
Reviewed by: Maria Guadalupe Vizoso Pinto, National University of Tucumán, Argentina Aldo Corsetti, University of Teramo, Italy
Probiotic bacteria offer a number of potential health benefits when administered in sufficient amounts that in part include reducing the number of harmful organisms in the intestine, producing antimicrobial substances and stimulating the body’s immune response
Summary
The human intestinal microbiota is a complex ecosystem with considerable impact on human health and well-being, contributing to maturation of the immune system and providing a direct barrier against pathogen colonization (Doré and Corthier, 2010). The composition and function of human microbial populations associated with various body sites have been studied with the help of metagenomic tools as part of two recent initiatives – the NIH Human Microbiome Project (HMP) and the European Metagenomics of the Human Intestine (metaHIT) project (NIH HMP Working Group et al, 2009; Dusko Ehrlich and MetaHIT Consortium, 2011) These massive molecular approaches have already revealed the presence of three different clusters, or enterotypes, which correspond to one of three most abundant genera of human intestine – Bacteroides, Prevotella, and Ruminococcus (Arumugam et al, 2013). Pathogen inhibition by human intestinal microbiota may provide significant human health benefits through protection against infection as a natural barrier against pathogen exposure in the GIT (Wallace et al, 2011) Factors such as food contamination by pathogens, as well as the high load of antibiotics in soil and animal feed, can influence the microbial ecology of human GIT (Sapkota et al, 2007). Probiotics are currently being examined for their potential treatments of these aforementioned disorders
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