Developments in probiotic encapsulation.

Probiotics are live micro-organisms that bring benefits to consumer health. However, to exert these benefits, the micro-organisms must remain viable during processing and for the shelf-life of food (with a recommended number of viable cells above 10 6 UFC/g) and must be resistant to gastrointestinal (GI) fluids. However, in general, probiotic cultures have problems related to their viability, stability and depreciation of the sensory acceptability of foods through the production of off-flavours. Overcoming these problems required considerable research effort. As a result, numerous studies have shown that microencapsulation is an alternative for probiotics to provide stability, viability, no proliferation in food and, additionally, controlled release in the intestine. There are still many challenges in this area, such as determining the mechanisms of release of the content of the microcapsules, development of low-cost enteric polymer microcapsules, development of symbiotic microcapsules and conferring thermal stability to probiotic cultures. In this context, this review aims at demonstrating the advances available in microencapsulation of probiotics.