Abstract
The awareness regarding use of probiotics for health benefits has created a huge market worldwide. The use of probiotic cultures and its success in commercial scale is relying on the techniques employed to ensure that the potential cultures with desired functional activity are stable and viable for longer period. The present study was undertaken to statistically evaluate the effect of lyoprotectant in the suspension media containing sucrose and reconstituted skim milk on the viability of Lactobacillus acidophilus strains. The central composite rotatable design of response surface methodology was used in evaluating the survival rate and viability even after 24 months’ storage of three different lyophilized strains of L. acidophilus. We also determined the exclusive use of lyoprotectant on the survival of the lyophilized strains throughout the study period without altering any of the culture conditions. The most conspicuous result to emerge from the data is that the suspension medium composed of minimal amount of sucrose (~ 1.2%) in the reconstituted skim milk (6%) was evident in maintaining a higher survival rate of lyophilized culture during 2-year storage. From this investigation, the optimized suspension media used to obtain the lyophilized concentrate of L. acidophilus could be recommended in designing dietary supplement with minimal modification for industrial application. This might reduce the manufacturing cost as well as storage loss occurring both in pharma and food sector.
Highlights
Probiotics are viable microorganisms gaining importance for optimum health benefits to alleviate the gut related disorders and modulate immune response (Morelli and Capurso 2012)
In this work, we have optimized the lyophilization and storage conditions of 3 known L. acidophilus strains with proven commercial usage profile as a probiotic supplement
As reported by earlier researchers, the viability of probiotic cultures after lyophilization and storage depends on the several factors (Broeckx et al 2016; Kailasapathy 2013)
Summary
Probiotics are viable microorganisms gaining importance for optimum health benefits to alleviate the gut related disorders and modulate immune response (Morelli and Capurso 2012). The viability problem crops-up during storage of the product. The probiotics enriched products for commercial supply needs to be developed to meet the drawbacks in storage in all kinds of weather. Earlier researchers have emphasized the use of optimal preservation methods to be employed during long-term storage for the efficacy of probiotic products with higher viability of the microorganisms (Bigliardi and Galati 2013). The simplest classical method, lyophilization has been widely used for the past several years to produce viable culture in dried powder form. The continued efforts of the investigators began to add information that was much needed at the time of optimization considering the stability of microorganisms during the lyophilization process and long-term storage (She and Petti 2015)
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