Award details

Potential prebiotic effect of almond seeds

Reference	BBS/E/F/00042395
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Dr Martin Wickham
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors
Institution	Quadram Institute Bioscience
Department	Quadram Institute Bioscience Department
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	2,300
Status	Completed
Type	Institute Project
Start date	01/11/2006
End date	31/10/2007
Duration	12 months

Abstract

A prebiotic is defined as "a non-digestible" food ingredient which beneficially affects the host by selectively stimulating the growth and/or activity of one or a limited number of bacterial groups in the colon and thus improving the host health¿. Prebiotics of proven efficacy are able to modulate the gut microbiota by stimulating indigenous beneficial flora components while suppressing, or not affecting, less desirable bacteria, such as proteolytic bacteroides and clostridia The potential prebiotic effect of almond seeds will be compared with commercially available prebiotic compounds, such as fructo-oligosaccharides (FOS).In vitro gastric and duodenum digestions will be firstly performed. Both duodenum digesta and baseline material will be added to batch fermentations to give a final concentration of 1% (w/v). To reliably determine the bacterial metabolism of almond seeds, continuous culture systems inoculated with mixed faecal bacteria will be used. The enumeration of bacteria will be performed by fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) available at IFR, which allows the counting of different groups of gut bacteria by using specific hybridization probes. The release of short chain fatty acids (lactic, acetic, propionic, butyric) will be determined during the fermentation period by HPLC.

Summary

unavailable

Committee	Closed Committee - Agri-food (AF)
Research Topics	X – not assigned to a current Research Topic
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	X - not in an Initiative
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

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