Case Study: Flow Cytometry for Microencapsulated Probiotic Enumeration
The Challenge
Microencapsulation of cells allows the introduction of probiotics into new products, like drinks. A customer used this technology to produce a new product called “Bubbly Bifid Probiotic Cola” with a label claim of 12 billion CFU/serving micro-encapsulated Bifidobacterium. To achieve label compliance, they formulated the cola with 16 billion CFU/serving micro-encapsulated Bifidobacterium. However, traditional plate count results showed only 1 billion CFU/serving.
Our Approach
Our team used flow cytometry to evaluate the cause of low cell counts. The results showed 12.5 billion AFU live cells, 2.5 billion AFU injured cells, 1 billion AFU dead cells. This means the claimed number of cells are in the product, but plating methods failed to recover the live cells.
The Solution
Microencapsulation is increasingly popular for probiotic products. However, traditional cell count methods struggle to accurately recover and detect live, microencapsulated cells. Flow cytometry provides a rapid and reliable avenue for suitable microencapsulated live, injured, and dead cell detection.
Our Team
Eurofins Microbiology Laboratories, Inc. in Madison, WI is our Center of Excellence to support probiotics and has the necessary expertise and capabilities to individually evaluate each product and ensure we are preparing the samples for accurate identification, enumeration, or contamination. We actively work with probiotic suppliers to become qualified to run their strain-specific enumeration procedures and offer them to our joint customers.
Reach out to us to learn more about how we can partner with your team!
