Next generation probiotics for antimicrobials production – from biosynthesis to resistance: gut microbiota as source of new antimicrobial peptides with biotechnological application

Project Details

Description

Current trends in maintaining and improving health are centered on disease prevention rather than treatment. This requires personalized health solutions seamlessly integrated in individual´s lifestyle. Gut microbiota is both a major contributor to and indicator of an individual’s general health. Besides the metabolic role, gut microbiota is an important barrier- and immune-modulator contributing to the prevention of metabolic and inflammatory diseases. Such actions also increase resistance against pathogens, decreasing the risk of bacterial infections and the need for antibiotics. Probiotic bacteria, sourced from the gut or from fermented foods, play a key role in the modulation of the gut health ecosystem and are of great interest to improve human health. Specifically, their potential for in situ postbiotics production, namely, antimicrobial peptides (AMP), may be exploited to selectively manipulate the gut microbiome. Emerging as new probiotic candidates (NGP) are some commensal bacteria, which have proven beneficial effects to the host and are generally considered intrinsically safe, as they are part of the normal host’s microbiota. Studies have characterized several NGP and the nature of their interaction with other commensal bacteria and the host. Even so, further studies are still required and there is a pressing need to identify, among these microbial symbionts, AMP that precisely target specific pathogens. Given NGP fastidious nature, this research strategy will apply culture-independent techniques to ensure and maximize the expected outcomes in terms of AMP screening and production. A genome mining approach will be used simultaneously with an advanced methodology for transcriptomic analysis. These versatile AMP can have many new market applications either as
preservatives for food matrices, replacing synthetic additives, or as coadjuvants in probiotic preventive therapies, namely, in the protection against gut colonization by pathogens, with direct impacts on public health. The identified AMP can be then synthetized by the original producer – if this production occurs naturally or is triggered – or in a suitable heterologous host, which also provides an advantage over the culturability issues of most NGP. This hypothesis-driven proposal intends to provide a pipeline that can be generally applied to NGP and gut microbiota for AMP detection, characterization, and production, providing innovative biopreservation solutions, value-added probiotic/postbiotic formulations, and efficient, cost competitive, optimized methodology to be applied to strictly anaerobic NGP, exceeding state-of-the-art technologies. To ensure safety requirements against antimicrobial resistance spreading, all strains´ resistome and their possible mobilizable nature will be characterized using genomic analysis. This project will be a disruptive and comprehensive step forward in the field
of NGP science toward future added-value, sustainable healthcare applications
Short titleNext generation probiotics for antimicrobials production – from biosynthesis to resistance
AcronymNGP4AMP
StatusActive
Effective start/end date1/11/2431/10/30

Keywords

  • Antimicrobial peptides
  • Gut Microbiota
  • Next-Generation Probiotics
  • Postbiotics
  • Resistome

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