Unless you ’ve been subsist under a rock for the last few years , you ’ve believably heard about the wellness benefit of yogurt and other fermented food . Clinical trial have discover that probiotic flora ( helpful bacterium ) can help ease a chain of symptoms . But what they have n’t found is how , exactly , they knead . Now scientists writing in the journalApplied and Environmental Microbiologyhave got a theory .
The bacterial strain calledLactobacillus paracaseiDG grow by nature in our mouths and guts . It ’s also a coarse component in probiotic add-on and so - call functional food like probiotic yogurt . We ’re glad to buy it and exhaust it , but we do n’t have it off what makes it ticktock .
Researchers at Italy ’s Università degli Studi di Milano and the University of Huddersfield in the UK hypothesize thatL. paracaseiDG was secreting some strange chemical chemical compound phone an exopolysaccharide ( EPS ) . They searched through the bacterium ’s desoxyribonucleic acid and , certain enough , found cistron that make EPS .
The next footstep was to figure out what kind of EPS it was and what it did . They conducted chemical substance tryout and nuclear magnetic rapport to canvass the EPS at a molecular point . They found that a declamatory part of the chemical compound was made of rhamnose , a sugar commonly get in probiotic strains .
Next , the team dispense the EPS to dwell human immune cells and watched to see how they would react . Because probiotics are often used to ease symptoms of inflammation , it might be expected that the EPS would be a calming influence , but the opposite was true : The comportment of the compound triggered a release of inflammatory chemicals from the immune cell .
joint author Andrew P. Laws says this seemingly counterintuitive finding actually makes a lot of mother wit . " We have grounds that our polyose obligate to and gently activate the receptors which release pro - inflammatory messenger , " hesaidin a statement . " We conceive that this generates a lesser incitive response than what would occur if the same receptors were activated by pathogenic bacterium . "
It ’s a foreign strategy , but it ’s not completely unheard of . Scientists studying the “ mind - control ” germToxoplasma gondiirecently account that the parasite use avery similar techniqueto elude detection within the body of its master of ceremonies .
