Synbiotics are always considered to be beneficial in healthy manipulation of gut environment; however, the purpose of this research was to investigate the dominance of synbiotic over the individual potential of probiotics and prebiotics. Four different types of prebiotics, fructo-oligosaccharides, raffinose, inulin, and cellobiose, were evaluated based on their varying degree of polymerization, combined each with 2 different Lactobacilli strains, including Lactobacillus paracasei 276 and Lactobacillus plantarum WCFS1. The effects of synbiotics combination on the surface structure were evaluated by analyzing auto-aggregation, membrane hydrophobicity, and adhesion to Caco-2 cells. Our results showed that both Lactobacilli exhibited significantly greater degree of attachment to Caco-2 cells (23.31% and 16.85%, respectively) when using cellobiose as a substrate than with other prebiotics (P < 0.05). Intestinal adhesion ability was in correlation with the percent of auto-aggregation, both Lactobacillus exhibited higher percent of auto-aggregation in cellobiose compared to other prebiotics. These behavioral changes in terms of attachment and auto-aggregation were further supported with the changes noticed from infrared spectra (FT-IR).
Keywords: Lactobacillus; membrane hydrophobicity; prebiotics; probiotics.
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