Development of Food grade Edible Growth Media Using Food processing by-products: Production and Delivery of Probiotics

Vegetarian probiotic foods by meaning must be free from all animal-derived ingredients. This not only includes the product ingredients but the probiotic inoculum as well.

- Manoj Kumar Tripathi Saroj Kumar Giri and Rahul M. Srivastva

Probiotic starter cultures are usually grown and stored in media containing milk or meat-derived ingredients. The presence of such ingredients makes the probiotic cell concentrates inappropriate for use in vegetarian products and thus creates the need for a growth medium free from animal-derived ingredients. Conventional nutrient media comprises of several non-edible components which are not suitable to consume when the organism is ready to intake as probiotics growing in chemical media (Lactobacillus grown in MRS media).

A growth medium is a solid, liquid or semi-solid intended to support the growth of microorganisms. Growth medium contains several elements which microorganisms needed for growth and are not selective, therefore they are uses for the universal cultivation and maintenance of bacteria kept in laboratory culture collections. An undefined medium (also known as a basal) contains a carbon source such as glucose, various salts, a source of amino acids and nitrogen like beef and yeast extract. Growth media offers minimum cell injury, appropriate for screening and maximum viability of cells.

The cost of media is also an important concern. Commercially available media are costly and non-consumable. Peptones are the most extensively nitrogen source for majority of microbial media. Some are prepared by cooking milk or meat products (beef, pork) in acid, but most are made by incubating milk or meat with trypsin, pepsin, or other proteolytic enzymes to digest the protein to a mixture of amino acids, peptides, and polypeptides. These microbial growth media are exceedingly uses in microbiological research. These media are now extensively used in fermented food industries.