Emerging Trends in Novel Technological Advancements in Oligosaccharide Production and Their Potential Applications as Prebiotics with Beneficial Effects

In the fast-growing global population, several health problems have arisen owing to bad lifestyles and consumption of unhealthy food. Prebiotics are a boon to reversing these ill effects and benefitting human health. Food supplemented with prebiotics constitutes of indigestible carbohydrate oligosaccharides or dietary fibres of low molecular weight that can be metabolized by beneficial bacteria contributing to their growth, thereby reducing the population of pathogenic bacteria in the gut. The classical technologies for prebiotics production involving physical and acid/chemical methods of hydrolysis have several drawbacks. The recent biotechnological advances have adopted microbial enzymes in techniques like enzyme immobilization using immobilized enzyme disk reactors, promoting polysaccharide hydrolysis in an efficient way to produce oligosaccharides with high yield and purity. Prebiotics can also be used in animal feed. Besides increasing the gut microflora, consumption of prebiotics can help in preventing diarrhoea, ulcerative colitis, cholesterol, obesity, cardiac diseases and cancer, thereby potentiating immunity.