Postbiotics: an exposition on next generation functional food compounds- opportunities and challenges

Abstract

Consumer’s interest for health promoting foods has reshaped the food industry to come up with novel biological compounds with diverse health benefits. Postbiotic are the cell fractions, or cell lysates which have emerged as potential functional food compounds during the last decade. The health benefits of postbiotic are well established while attempts are underway to understand their interaction, production, processing and safety. The review explore the challenges and opportunities to devise better growth mediums, cell lysis and extraction, characterization, stability and applications of postbiotics in both food and pharma industry along with the market trends, success stories and safety concerns regarding postbiotics. The scientific and commercial interest in postbiotic have resulted in extensive investigations and clinical documentation of various physiological benefits and additional bioactivity. The findings validate food and pharma application of the postbiotics and further emphasize on documentation of bioactivity and safety of these compounds.

Graphical Abstract

Keywords:

• Probiotics
• postbiotics
• biopreservation
• genetic engineering
• functional characterization biofilms

Acknowledgement

The authors are highly thankful to Dr. Y. S. Parmar University of Horticulture and Forestry, Nauni, Solan (HP) and Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana for providing the necessary infrastructure and support for the study.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that there are no potential competing interests.

Additional information

Funding

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