A study exploring new insights on postbiotics

Abstract

Postbiotics are soluble compounds from bacteria with beneficial effects on hosts, produced through fermentation processes, sometimes involving bacterial death that yields suboptimal compounds. They are utilized in foods for functionality, nutraceuticals for health improvements, and pharmaceuticals for disease diagnosis. Despite this, understanding and quantification of postbiotics are lacking. This review explores their production methods and therapeutic, industrial, and functional properties, emphasizing their role in food safety and applications. Postbiotics include secretions from living bacteria such as polysaccharides, teichoic acids, soluble proteins, and organic acids, many being bioactive compounds. Conversely, postbiotics can also emerge from cell-free supernatants, leading to lower bioactivity. Recently, they have garnered interest for extending shelf life, enhancing nutritional properties, and promoting health. The diverse bioactive components have broad applications across food, pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, and agrochemicals. Increased research focuses on different strains of Lactic Acid Bacteria, highlighting their postbiotics for food structuring applications. Breakthroughs in understanding postbiotics’ biostabilization of hydrocarbons reveal new avenues for controlled structuring. Anticipation grows for food-grade, bio-based, and biodegradable alternatives to synthetic polymers, with postbiotics from whey protein concentrate also showing potential. Improved experimental techniques are enhancing comprehension of postbiotics’ interactions in food matrices and microbiomes both in vitro and in vivo.

DOI - https://doi.org/10.65525/SVUP.9788199651579.2026.120-144