Growing Probiotics as an Own Microbial Community

 

How Serious Are the Problems with Dysbiosis?

The importance of gut microbiota as an organ of human body has been more and more recognized, and many diseases due to changes or un-balances of gut microbiota, i.e. dysbiosis, have been defined. The diseases include not only the ones in bowels such as diarrhea and constipation, but also those seriously affecting human lives such as cardiovascular diseases, gastric cancers, obesities, type 2 diabetes, allergies, IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), erasing osteoporosis, autism, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, etc.. These diseases have been increased in the world with tremendously high-accelerated rates in recent decades (Clemente et al., 2012).

 

How to Choose Good Probiotic Products?

So far, only few heath microbes have been approved to be probiotics as dietary supplements or even medicines, but hundreds of commercial products of probiotics have occupied the shelve of stores. What kind of probiotic products is your smart choice? Active Probiotics.

Most probiotics products are not active cultures. You can tell when NO refrigeration is required”. They are mainly in capsule form and listing impressive numbers like billions of microbes. It's because when released in your gut, a majority of these ‘sleeping’ microbes are destroyed by their competitors and passes right through your intestine. IMPLANT is one of critical steps for probiotic functions. (Zmora, N. et al., 2018)

 

How Do We Prepare the Active Probiotics?

The healthy microbes in our products are active, because they have never suffered from drying or freezing that are necessary steps in the procedures for making capsule products. In addition, to survive and eventually colonize in the gut environment that is an existing microbial community (Robinson et al., 2010), our microbes should unite together as an own microbial community. The media and culture conditions for our microbes were specially designed to reach this goal.

 

Product features

RiceJogurt is a team of probiotics composed of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Lactobacillus plantarum, L. bulgaricus, L. fermentans and L. helhele. Members are not simply mixed, but are trained into mutual help and harmonious coexistence of the combat collective, that is, the so-called Microbial Community, after a long-turn, uninterrupted running-in screening by using adopting modern advanced science and technology according to their respective functions. The whole production process is carried out by simulating the survival mode of human intestinal flora. Therefore, the product is a viable and adaptable intestinal flora. Such probiotic products can effectively overcome the resistance of the original intestinal flora, improve the colonization rate of probiotics in gut, and enable the products to effectively improve the gastrointestinal digestion and absorption function, coordinate the functions of various organs of the human body, improve the human immunity, and resist oxidation and aging. This is the first feature of Miccomm's probiotics convenient porridge.

The second characteristic of RiceJogurt.

Different from the tablet powder probiotics on the market, this product didn’t suffer from drying and freezing, the steps necessary for the procedure for capsule products, and therefore, retains all the metabolites produced during the growth of these health microbes. These metabolites are not only targeted by medical science for the gastrointestinal function, such as promoting digestion and absorption of the gastrointestinal tract, providing various essential amino acids, various vitamins, maintaining the beneficial acidic environment of the intestinal tract, inhibiting the growth of harmful bacteria and so on. More importantly, these metabolites also contain a variety of substances necessary for the health and functions of other organs of the human body, such as the special small molecules in the operation of the brain-intestine axis and the liver-intestine axis, the regulatory factors of bone formation, the normal cleaning of the cardiovascular system, the regulation of blood glucose and lipid, the maintenance and activation of the immune system and so on. It has been reported that 36% of small molecules in human blood are produced by gut microbiota, and the ultimate goal of probiotics is to optimally supply these indispensable metabolites to intestinal flora.

The third feature.

The unique detoxification function lies in the degradation of benzene ring derivatives that poison intestinal microorganisms. The bactericidal capacity of the preservative, sodium benzoate, undoubtedly makes an indelible contributions to food storage, but once the food is ingested, the preservative, poses a threat to microorganisms in intestinal. This product provides a new way to eliminate the side effects of preservatives.

 

What’s the actual roles of Probiotics in protection from

virus infections?

It is very popularly known that probiotics benefit the prevention from flu infection, but I am pretty sure that you might not fully understand the mechanisms underlying the prevention. Actually, in human body there are three defense lines against viral infection, each benefiting from probiotics:

The first line of defense, mucus.

The main channels of viral infection are respiratory tract or the digestive tract. Even if the virus enters the trachea of the nostril, or the small intestine and large intestine, it must pass through a layer of mucus `outside the cell. The mucosal epithelial surface itself is a barrier against the virus. In addition, the mucus also colonized or adheres to a large number of microbes in the body. These microbes form their own communities, called Microbial Communities. To any foreigners, such as viruses, the Community produces metabolites to resist them. The metabolites having been identified so far include organic acids, hydrogen peroxide, bioactive agents, bacteriocins, and so on. What's even more interesting is that probiotic bacteria may bind directly to viruses and inhibit them to attach to host cell receptors. For instance, there is evidence that specific strains of Lactobacilli are able to bind and inactivate vesicular stomatitis virus (flu-like virus) in vitro. So, as long as the mucus is healthy, it's hard for the virus to get through, or most of viruses get locked out of the mucosal epithelial surface. Whether in theory or in practice, probiotics play a crucial role in the production, improvement and health of mucus, and the health of the flora.

The second line of defense, cellular immunity.

If the virus passes mucus by virtue of a variety of circumstances, that is to say, it breaks through the first line of defense, touches the human body cell, and finally entered the cell through the receptor. Before reproduction of the virus, however, the human body has already activated the immune mechanisms of the cell level. The activation begins with the recognition of the virus as an antigen. Upon recognition of antigen, the epithelial or underlying effector cells (macrophages, dendritic cells, neutrophils) induce antiviral cytokines such as interferon (IFNs), as well as pro-inflammatory cytokines and chemokines, initiating cell-mediated viral elimination and adaptive immune responses. Probiotics may mediate their antiviral effects against viruses possibly by eliciting systemic immune responses via gut or enhancing cellular immunity with increased activity of natural killer cells and macrophages. In the gut epithelial cells and/or antigen-presenting cells, probiotics are recognized by toll-like receptors (TLRs). Probiotics may, therefore, modulate cytokine expression patterns through epithelial cells and through underlying professional antigen-presenting cells, such as macrophages and dendritic cells. Many experimental studies in vitro and in animals show that specific strains of probiotics are capable of providing protection against virus infections by stimulating antiviral cytokine and chemokine responses in the respiratory and gastrointestinal epithelial cells or immune cells. In short, the above two lines of defense against viruses reflect in why people differ in their ability to resist viral infection due to probiotic background.

The third line of defense, humoral immunity

If the virus breaks through the first two lines of defense, replicating itself inside a host human cell, multiplying by one to thousands, and then entering the bloodstream, that's the time you catch a cold. For the common cold, it is just fever or coughing a few days or more.

If it is SARS, MERS or COVID-19, however, it might be life-threatening pneumonia. At this point, the body's final defense mechanism, the adaptive immune system, will produce antibodies against foreign viruses to eventually clear the body of the virus. The adaptive immune mechanism is initiated when the virus attaches the epithelial cells at the second line of defense, but needs several days to develop and produce antibodies. At present, a considerable amount of literatures have proved that some specific strains of Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium are also very helpful for the production of antibodies and thus oral ingestion of these probiotics has adjuvant-like effects.

 

REFERENCES

Clemente, J. C., Luke K. Ursell,1Laura Wegener Parfrey, and Rob Knight: The Impact of the Gut Microbiota on Human Health: An Integrative View. Cell. (2012) 148(6):1258-70

Zmora, N. et al. Personalized Gut Mucosal Colonization Resistance to Empiric Probiotics Is Associated with Unique Host and Microbiome Features. Cell. (2018) 174(9): 1388–1405

Robinson, C. J., B. J. M. Bohannan, and V. B. Young. From Structure to Function: the Ecology of Host-Associated Microbial Communities. MICROBIOL . MOL . BIOL . REV. (2010) 74(3): 453–476.