Microorganisms for Functional Food

Nowadays, most of Western consumers are aware that a targeted diet could be an important tool for fighting ageing and diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, and obesity. Microorganisms may be exploited for setting up novel foods that, beside their nutritional value, may positively impact on consumers’ health. Some microorganisms may benefit host when ingested as viable cells carried by food and beverages. This falls in the intriguing field of probiotics, recently brought forward by the numerous probiotic claims rejected by the European Food Security Authority. This research topic is going to include manuscripts contributing to a new definition of what a probiotic microorganism is, as well as papers about novel foods as vehicles of probiotics, influence of food matrix on probiotic activities of microorganisms, and mechanisms of interaction between probiotic food and host.
Furthermore, microorganisms may function as cell factories producing biogenic compounds, which could benefit consumers’ health. Studies on exploitation of food surplus, by-products and/or waste as a base for producing biogenic compounds are of special interest for the current research topic. Manuscripts (reviews included) about the metabolic significance of a given biogenic compound in the microbial cell economy, the optimization of culture conditions for increasing the yield of a given biogenic compound, and in vitro (human cell lines) and/or in vivo activity of biogenic compounds are also welcome.