A novel bioactive postbiotics: from microbiota-derived extracellular nanoparticles to health promoting

Abstract

In recent years, the emerging concern regarding safety issues associated with live bacterial cells is enhancing the interest in using cell components and metabolites derived from microbiota. Therefore, the term “postbiotics” is increasingly found in food microbiology, food scientific and commercial products. Postbiotics is defined as non-viable microorganisms or their components that provide benefits to the host. Many in vivo and in vitro experiments have shown that beneficial microbiota-generated extracellular nanoparticles (NPs) confer unique health promoting functions to the intestinal local and systemic effects, which can be considered as a novel postbiotics. Meanwhile, the postbiotics-NPs is a protective complex, delivering bioactive components to reach distant tissues and organs at high concentrations. These properties demonstrate that postbiotics-NPs may contribute to the improvement of host health by regulating specific gut microbiota and physiological functions, while the exact mechanisms are not fully elucidated. This review highlights the current understanding of postbiotics-NPs functional properties and mechanisms of health benefits, especially focusing on the interactions in gut microbiota and host, functions in human health and potential applications in future functional food and biomedical fields.

Keywords:

• Microbiome
• postbiotics
• microbiota-derived nanoparticles
• health promoting
• functional food
• biomedical function

Authors’ contributuions

Gu Zelin contributed to conceptualization, writing – original draft, visualization. Meng Shunhan contributed to writing-review & editing, visualization. Wang Yu contributed to investigation. Bo Lyu contributed to investigation. Li Pinglan involved in writing-review & editing, funding acquisition. Shang Nan involved in supervision, writing-review & editing.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 32172172, 31671831).