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Probiotic ingestion is recommended as a preventive approach to maintain the balance of the intestinal microbiota and to enhance the human well-being. During the whole life of each individual, the gut microbiota composition could be altered by lifestyle, diet, antibiotic therapies and other stress conditions, which may lead to acute and chronic disorders. Hence, probiotics can be administered for the prevention or treatment of some disorders, including lactose malabsorption, acute diarrhoea, irritable bowel syndrome, necrotizing enterocolitis and mild forms of inflammatory bowel disease. The probiotic-mediated effect is an important issue that needs to be addressed in relation to strain-specific probiotic properties. In this work, the probiotic properties of new Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium strains were screened, and their effects in vitro were evaluated. They were screened for probiotic properties by determining their tolerance to low pH and to bile salts, antibiotic sensitivity, antimicrobial activity and vitamin B8, B9 and B12 production, and by considering their ability to increase the antioxidant potential and to modulate the inflammatory status of systemic-miming cell lines in vitro. Three out of the examined strains presenting the most performant probiotic properties, as Lactobacillus plantarum PBS067, Lactobacillus rhamnosus PBS070 and Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis PBSO75, were evaluated for their effects also on human intestinal HT-29 cell line. The obtained results support the possibility to move to another level of study, that is, the oral administration of these probiotical strains to patients with acute and chronic gut disorders, by in vivo experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of diversity in biological communities is an intriguing field. Huge amount of data are nowadays available (provided by the innovative DNA sequencing techniques), and management, analysis and display of results are not trivial. Here, we propose for the first time the use of phylogenetic entropy as a measure of bacterial diversity in studies of microbial community structure. We then compared our new method (i.e. the web tool phyloh) for partitioning phylogenetic diversity with the traditional approach in diversity analyses of bacteria communities. We tested phyloh to characterize microbiome in the honeybee ( Apis mellifera, Insecta: Hymenoptera) and its parasitic mite varroa ( Varroa destructor, Arachnida: Parasitiformes). The rationale is that the comparative analysis of honeybee and varroa microbiomes could open new perspectives concerning the role of the parasites on honeybee colonies health. Our results showed a dramatic change of the honeybee microbiome when varroa occurs, suggesting that this parasite is able to influence host microbiome. Among the different approaches used, only the entropy method, in conjunction with phylogenetic constraint as implemented in phyloh, was able to discriminate varroa microbiome from that of parasitized honeybees. In conclusion, we foresee that the use of phylogenetic entropy could become a new standard in the analyses of community structure, in particular to prove the contribution of each biological entity to the overall diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]