Issues deserve attention in encapsulating probiotics: Critical review of existing literature

ABSTRACT

Probiotic bacteria are being increasingly added to food for developing products with health-promoting properties. However, the efficacy of probiotics in commercial products is often questioned due to the loss of their viability during shelf storage and in human gastrointestinal tracts. Encapsulation of probiotics has been expected to provide protection to probiotics, but not many commercial products contain encapsulated and viable probiotic cells owing to various reasons. To promote the development and application of encapsulation technologies, this paper has critically reviewed previous publications with a focus on the areas where studies have fallen short, including insufficient consideration of structural effects of encapsulating material, general defects in encapsulating methods and issues in evaluation methodologies and risk assessments for application. Corresponding key issues that require further studies are highlighted. Some emerging trends in the field, such as current treads in encapsulating material and recently advanced encapsulation techniques, have also been discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Probiotics
• encapsulation
• gastrointestinal tracts
• storage
• food

Funding

This work was supported by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31260386 and 31401655) as well as the Research Project of Jiangxi Department of Education (GJJ14214). JC was a visiting scholar to JG's lab with financial support from Nanchang University, China.