Recent trends in the biotechnology of functional non-digestible oligosaccharides with prebiotic potential

ABSTRACT

Prebiotics as a part of dietary nutrition can play a crucial role in structuring the composition and metabolic function of intestinal microbiota and can thus help in managing a clinical scenario by preventing diseases and/or improving health. Among the different prebiotics, non-digestible carbohydrates are molecules that selectively enrich a typical class of bacteria with probiotic potential. This review summarizes the current knowledge about the different aspects of prebiotics, such as its production, characterization and purification by various techniques, and its link to novel product development at an industrial scale for wide-scale use in diverse range of health management applications. Furthermore, the path to effective valorization of agricultural residues in prebiotic production has been elucidated. This review also discusses the recent developments in application of genomic tools in the area of prebiotics for providing new insights into the taxonomic characterization of gut microorganisms, and exploring their functional metabolic pathways for enzyme synthesis. However, the information regarding the cumulative effect of prebiotics with beneficial bacteria, their colonization and its direct influence through altered metabolic profile is still getting established. The future of this area lies in the designing of clinical condition specific functional foods taking into consideration the host genotypes, thus facilitating the creation of balanced and required metabolome and enabling to maintain the healthy status of the host.

KEYWORDS:

• Prebiotics
• non-digestible oligosaccharides
• functional foods
• gut microbiome
• multi-omics tools

Acknowledgements

Authors would like to acknowledge Director, CSIR-NEERI and AcSIR- NEERI for providing essential resources for the research work. The manuscript has been internally checked for plagiarism through iThenticate software and assigned the KRC No. CSIR-NEERI/KRC/2021/MAY/EBGD/4. Mr. Atul Rajkumar Chavan and Ashish Kumar Singh is thankful to CSIR, New Delhi for Senior Research Fellowship, while Suraj Prabhakarrao Nakhate and Rakesh Kumar Gupta are thankful to UGC, New Delhi for Senior Research Fellowship for carrying out this research.

Disclosure statement

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

Authors contributions

ARC: Investigation, Formal analysis, Visualization, Writing-Original draft. SPN, AKS, RKG, BJP: Resources, Visualization, Data curation. AAK: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Writing-Review and Editing, Supervision. VVG, HJP: Supervision, Writing-Review and Editing

Consent for publication

All authors have consented for publication.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.