Title : Uncovering the probiotics diversity of beehive products and flowers microbiotas with metagenomic analysis.
Abstract:
New Nordic is a Swedish based company with a unique know-how in the field of medicinal plants. It develops and markets effective herbal food supplements that meet specific health and beauty needs. For many years, New Nordic has been particularly interested in wild microorganisms, resulting in the isolation and whole genome sequencing of interesting strains as natural probiotics, or allowing increased bioavailability of plants active ingredients through fermentation.
Thus, with one of its research partners specialized in plants, microbiology and sequencing, the Plants and Pathogens laboratory of HEPIA (Switzerland), several microbiotas analysis by metagenomics have been carried out in the last few years on different bees’ gut, beehive products (such as honey, honeydew, pollen, bee bread, royal jelly) and flowers.
The proposed study consisted in a metagenomic profiling of six beehive related products microbiotas (one sample of fresh pollen, three of different honeys, one of honeydew and one of royal jelly) and two internal and external flowers microbiotas (from rose and lavender) which would provide a detailed profile of all microbial prokaryotic and eukaryotic microorganisms present in these samples as well as their relative proportions. It has also been planned to isolate and genetically identified some putative probiotic strains from the different samples, and to use them for further specific experiments of plants fermentation.
Apilactobacillus kunkeei species was found dominant in bee’s gut, honeys and in other royal jelly and pollen samples too.
New Nordic has been able to develop and market a dietary supplement called « Wild Biotic », composed of recognized probiotic strains and supplemented by various wild strains found in beehive’s products, honey being for example scientifically recognized to boost the immune system in the intestine by providing alive or even dead strains of Apilactobacillus kunkeei.
Two strains of A. kunkeei as well as several yeasts from honey such as Zygosaccharomyces rouxii or Zygosaccharomyces mellis are being studied alone or in co-culture to increase the antioxidant potential and the bioavailability of plant extracts bioactive compounds by fermentation.
