If You Could Design A Probiotic, What Would It Look Like?

Sarah LEBEER

Departement of Bioscience Engineering, University of Antwerpen

Rationale selection of probiotic strains with a higher likelihood of clinical effectiveness benefits from the increasing knowledge on the molecular microbiology of probiotics and the underlying mechanisms of probiotic action. In this lecture, I will provide a perspective from a microbiological point of view that such comprehensive understanding is not straightforward. I will show examples of well-documented probiotic effector molecules in mainly model probiotic Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium strains, and how they could promote probiotic actions. These molecules include surface-located molecules such as pili, glycoproteins and exopolysaccharides, , as well metabolites such as lactic acid, vitamins, CpG-rich DNA, and various enzymes such as lactase and bile salt hydrolases. I will also present some advances in genetic tool development, sequencing approaches and model systems, and how these advances could promote the design of probiotics.

This lecture will be based on the recent ISAPP manuscripts in Current Opinion in Biotechnology (Lebeer et al., 2018; Sanders et al., 2018)