Posted by 
Probiotics are present in yogurt, pickles, bread and some other foods. Researchers at Wake Forest School of Medicine have developed a probiotic “cocktail” derived from gut bacteria strains found in infant feces that may increase the body’s ability to produce short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs).
Short-chain fatty acids are a key component of good gut health, people with diabetes, obesity, autoimmune disorders and cancers frequently have fewer short-chain fatty acids. Increasing them may be helpful in maintaining and restoring a normal gut environment.
Specific probiotic strains can effectively prevent or treat certain diseases in both animal models and humans. This led to an extensive demand for probiotic supplements over the last decade, thereby prompting a massive increase in the development of new probiotic products for the consumer market.
However, these studies have primarily been conducted in animal models or human subjects with underlying diseases or conditions, reports on the effects of probiotics in healthy, disease-free subjects have remained relatively limited and inconsistent. The School of Medicine team designed the study to examine the effects of probiotic strains derived from healthy human fecal samples and to determine how they worked.
In the study, researchers collected fecal samples from the diapers of healthy infants. After following a robust protocol of isolation, characterization and safety validation of infant gut-origin Lactobacillus and Enterococcus strains with probiotic attributes, the researchers selected the 10 best out of the 321 analyzed.
To test the ability of these human-origin probiotics to change the gut microbiome-bacteria that live inside the digestive track and their capacity to produce SCFAs, mice were given a single dose, as well as five consecutive doses of this 10-strain probiotic cocktail. Then the researchers injected the same probiotic mixture in the same doses into a human feces medium.
The scientists found that the single- and five-dose feeding of these selected probiotics modulated the gut microbiome and enhanced the production of SCFAs in mouse gut and human feces. This provides evidence that these human-origin probiotics could be exploited as biotherapeutic regimens for human diseases associated with gut microbiome imbalance and decreased SCFA production in the gut.