Prebiotic utilisation provides Lactiplantibacillus plantarum a competitive advantage in vitro, but is not reflected by an increased intestinal fitness

ABSTRACT

Synbiotics combine the concepts of probiotics and prebiotics to synergistically enhance the health-associated effects of both components. Previously, we have shown that the intestinal persistence of inulin-utilizing L. plantarum Lp900 is significantly increased in rats fed an inulin-supplemented, high-calcium diet. Here we employed a competitive population dynamics approach to demonstrate that inulin and GOS can selectively enrich L. plantarum strains that utilize these substrates for growth during in vitro cultivation, but that such enrichment did not occur during intestinal transit in rats fed a GOS or inulin-supplemented diet. The intestinal persistence of all L. plantarum strains increased irrespective of their prebiotic utilization phenotype, which was dependent on the calcium level of the diet. Analysis of fecal microbiota and intestinal persistence decline rates indicated that prebiotic utilization capacity did not selectively stimulate intestinal persistence in prebiotic supplemented diets. Moreover, microbiota and organic acid profile analyses indicate that the prebiotic utilizing probiotic strains are vastly outcompeted by the endogenous prebiotic-utilizing microbiota, and that the collective enhanced persistence of all L. plantarum strains is most likely explained by their well-established tolerance to organic acids.

KEYWORDS:

• Lactiplantibacillus plantarum
• inulin
• galacto-oligosaccharides
• probiotics
• prebiotics
• intestinal persistence
• competition

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Kerstin Holmgren, Gunilla Önning and Niklas Larson from PROBI A/B for the fruitful discussions about the results obtained. We want to thank PROBI A/B and NIZO food research for providing the L. plantarum strains. Furthermore, we want to thank BENEO-Orafti and Friesland Campina DOMO for providing the inulin and Vivinal GOS, respectively. We would like to thank Prof Dr Heidy den Besten for her expert consultation on modeling bacterial decline rates. We are also grateful to the biotechnicians of the laboratory animal facility of the Wageningen University (Wageningen, the Netherlands) for their excellent technical assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].

Ethics approval and consent to participate

All performed animal experiments related to this study were approved by the Central Authority for Scientific Procedures on Animals (CCD) in the Netherlands.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/19490976.2024.2338946

Additional information

Funding

This work was sponsored by PROBI AB.