Encapsulation of probiotics using gelatin and sodium phytate for improvement of viability and antioxidant capacity in gastrointestinal condition

Natural organic compounds are desirable for encapsulation of probiotics to increase their viability while retain their safety as the food supplement. Using natural compounds as the coating agents for probiotics encapsulation is the safe and alternative way to more grantee the supplementary safety. In the present study, we used double layer protection composed of sodium phytate and gelatin as the natural and biocompatible components to develop the gut microbiota with superior resistance. The effectiveness of our proposed approach was determined using Bacillus subtilis as the probiotic model. Successful entrapment of probiotics was confirmed through spectroscopic and microscopic analysis. Encapsulated probiotics exhibited high performance with 70% viability in simulated gastrointestinal condition including 7.7 and 7.8 log CFU/mL in enteric phase I and II respectively. Moreover, the protective layers and their synergic effect after encapsulation have been investigated for the first time to evaluate their antioxidant capacity and showed high radical scavenging activity (RSA) to 85.12% and ferric reducing antioxidant potential (FRAP) results which possessed contribution of constitutes and reached to 31.45% increase in antioxidant capacity of probiotics. This study highlights the importance of selecting appropriate combination of layers to obtain the efficient encapsulation of probiotics.