Exopolysaccharides of lactic acid bacteria: Structure, bioactivity and associations: A review.

Highlights • Exopolysaccharide biosynthesis process and genetic modules are relatively conserved. • Both structures and functions of exopolysaccharide are diverse. • Functional mechanisms of exopolysaccharide lie in vitro or vivo or both of them. • The bioactivities are influenced by backbones, chain length and substitution of EPS. Abstract The ability to exhibit various bioactivities is widespread in exopolysaccharide (EPS) of lactic acid bacteria (LAB), and it has been admittedly associated with large structural variability of these polymers. Exceptional bioactivities such as cholesterol-lowering, immunomodulating, antioxidant, antiviral and anticoagulant effects render these biopolymers vast commercial value for global market and application potentials in medicine sector. Therefore, an elaborate understanding of structure-to-function associations will be prerequisite to search natural and artificial EPSs for new applications in functional food, health and medicine fields. In this review, it is presented a significant overview of the latest advances in the field of EPS from genes to application. This review emphasized in the general biosynthesis pathway together with genetic modules, multiple structures, functions, and respective functional mechanisms of LAB-derived EPSs, and the relationships between their structure and bioactivity, which will help to exploit new bioactive drugs from LAB-derived EPS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]