Abstract
The consumption of dietary supplements to treat health complications or to improve overall health conditions has become a globally increasing trend that leads to the development of a large number of health-related novel products and expands the associated manufacturing industries around the world. In the current study, we applied selective culturing combined with next-generation sequencing to examine the microbial viability in terms of its culturability on culture medium, composition, and possible contamination in the selected 17 commercial probiotic products sold in the mainland China market. Additionally, the relative abundance of each individual bacterial content was also evaluated by using the generated sequencing reads. The tested probiotic product samples were subjected to Illumina HiSeq-2000 sequencing platform and thoroughly analyzed by the in-house developed bioinformatics pipeline. The comprehensive culturing and sequencing analysis revealed both viability and composition inaccuracy among the several tested probiotic products, however, no contaminant was identified during the analysis. Among the total, five probiotic products (29.41%) were found with an inaccurate or lower colony-forming unit (CFU) counts on culture media while four probiotic products (23.52%) have inaccurately labeled classification. This study provides an ideal qualitative and quantitative assessment approach, which can be used as a diagnostic tool for the accurate assessment of commercial probiotic supplements.
Highlights
Probiotics, defined by the International Scientific Association of Probiotics and Prebiotic are “the products that deliver live microorganisms with a suitable viable count of well-defined strains with a reasonable expectation of delivering benefits for the well-being of the host” [1,2]
Each of the individual products was plated on two types of culture media, the general MRS media that usually support the growth of approximately all Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium species and the selective media for each microbial contents mentioned on the products label (Table 1)
Among the total tested probiotic products, the PB10 was the only product found with no viable bacterial content listed on the label, while the colony-forming unit (CFU) counts of the four others products PB4, PB8, PB9, and PB17 were lower than the label claim (Table 1)
Summary
Probiotics, defined by the International Scientific Association of Probiotics and Prebiotic are “the products that deliver live microorganisms with a suitable viable count of well-defined strains with a reasonable expectation of delivering benefits for the well-being of the host” [1,2]. Some studies suggest that some probiotic strains could be effective in rheumatoid arthritis and urinary tract infections [3]. To be considered as probiotic, a product must have to fulfill and meet strict criteria defined for probiotic products that include the quality, safety, and functionality [4]. The two key criteria related to the probiotic products are the viability of the mentioned products contents with a mentioned number of stated cells on the label and the accuracy of the label contents in terms of microbial composition. Various studies have found significant inaccuracy related to the stated cell numbers and the mentioned compositions on contents labels [4,5,6,7,8]
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