Isolation of bifidobacteria for blood group secretor status targeted personalised nutrition

Background: Currently, there is a constant need to find microbial products for maintaining or even improving host microbiota balance that could be targeted to a selected consumer group. Blood group secretor status, determining the ABO status, could be used to stratify the consumer group. Objective: We have applied a validated upper intestinal tract model (TIM-1) and culturing methods to screen potential probiotic bacteria from faeces of blood secretor and non-secretor individuals. Design: Faecal samples from healthy volunteers were pooled to age- and sex-matched secretor and non-secretor pools. Faecal pools were run through separate TIM-1 simulations, and bacteria were cultivated from samples taken at different stages of simulations for characterisation. Results: Microbes in secretor pool survived the transit through TIM-1 system better than microbes of non-secretor pool, especially bifidobacteria and anaerobes were highly affected. The differences in numbers of bifidobacteria and lactobacilli isolates after plate cultivations and further the number of distinct RAPD-genotypes was clearly lower in non-secretor pool than in secretor pool. Conclusions: In the present study, we showed that microbiota of secretor and non-secretor individuals tolerate gastrointestinal conditions differently and that a combination of gastrointestinal simulations and cultivation methods proved to be a promising tool for isolating potentially probiotic bacteria. Keywords: gastrointestinal simulation; probiotic screening; Bifidobacterium; intestinal; ABO blood group; secretor; non-secretor (Published: 18 June 2012) Citation: Microbial Ecology in Health & Disease 2012, 23 : 18578 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/mehd.v23i0.18578