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Framework as a Service, FaaS: Personalized Prebiotic Development for Infants with the Elements of Time and Parametric
Ka-Lung Lam1, Wai-Yin Cheng1, Fan Yang1
1Food and Nutritional Sciences, School of Life Sciences, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong SAR 000000, China.
Insights
Polymeric beta-glucans from barley show prebiotic potential, enhancing probiotic growth and metabolite production. This parametric modeling framework offers insights into novel prebiotic development for gut health.
Area of Science:
- Microbiology
- Nutritional Science
- Bioinformatics
Background:
- Understanding prebiotic efficacy requires robust evaluation of their impact on gut microbiota and metabolite production.
- Existing methods for assessing prebiotics often lack comprehensive analysis of growth dynamics and metabolite profiles.
- Parametric modeling offers a novel approach to quantify biological parameters from fermentation data.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop and apply a parametric modeling framework for evaluating prebiotic candidates.
- To assess the impact of 13 structural-characterized prebiotics on probiotic growth and metabolite production using infant fecal inoculum.
- To introduce a metabolite-based indicator for assessing gut microbiota eubiosis/dysbiosis.
Main Methods:
- In vitro fermentation for 205 hours with 13 prebiotic candidates and exclusively breastfed infant fecal inoculum.
- Parametric modeling to determine lag phase, maximum increase rate, and maximum capacity of probiotic growth.
- 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing of the infant fecal inoculum.
- Analysis of short-chain fatty acids and dissolved ammonia production.
- Development of a composite metabolite-based indicator for microbiota balance.
Main Results:
- Polymeric beta-glucans from barley demonstrated significant prebiotic potential, showing favorable metabolite production.
- Beta-glucans from oat and mushroom sclerotia exhibited comparable probiotic sustainability to alpha-glucans after 48 hours.
- Galacto-oligosaccharides and lactose showed moderate metabolite-based indicator values.
- A novel metabolite-based indicator was introduced to complement conventional microbial markers for eubiosis/dysbiosis assessment.
- Polymeric beta-glucans from barley offer substantial scope for structural modification and novel prebiotic development.
Conclusions:
- Parametric modeling provides a powerful framework for evaluating prebiotic candidates and understanding their biological relevance.
- Polymeric beta-glucans, particularly from barley, represent promising candidates for next-generation prebiotic development.
- The developed metabolite-based indicator offers a complementary approach to assess gut microbiota status.
- Further research utilizing time-series analysis and parametric modeling is anticipated to yield deeper insights into prebiotic-microbiota interactions.
Abstract:
We proposed a framework with parametric modeling to obtain biological relevant parameters from the total probiotic growth pattern and metabolite production curves. The lag phase, maximum increase rate, and maximum capacity were obtained via a 205-h exploratory in vitro fermentation of a library of 13 structural-characterized prebiotic candidates against an exclusively breastfed infant fecal inoculum. We also conducted 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing of the infant fecal inoculum. Moreover, we introduce a robust composite metabolite-based indicator that reflects the eubiosis/dysbiosis of microbiota to complement the conventional microbial markers. In terms of short-chain fatty acid, we discovered that polymeric beta-glucans from barley demonstrated potential as prebiotic candidates, while alpha-glucans as glycogen showed the least dissolved ammonia production. In terms of total probiotic, beta-glucans from oat and mushroom sclerotia of Pleurotus tuber-regium showed comparable sustainability when compared to alpha-glucans after 48 h. Being classical prebiotic, galacto-oligosaccharides gave the second-highest metabolite-based indicator, followed by lactose. While limited improvement could be made to lactose and oligosaccharides, polymeric beta-glucans from barley avails more capacity for novel prebiotic development, such as structural modification. We anticipate that more similar parallel screening with the element of time and parametric modeling will provide more novel insights.