, 2010). In addition, the JBO is customarily considered a preventative food against the common cold and

influenza in Japan. In support of this, a recent study reported that the macromolecular component obtained by aqueous solvent extraction of JBO had anti-influenza activity ( Lee et al., 2012). However, viscous substances (VS), a macromolecular component extractable by aqueous solvent and produced in the cavity of JBO (JBOVS), are not well-characterized with regard to their chemical and mineral compositions. Moreover, limited biological information about the effects of the JBOVS on host-microbial symbiotic systems in the intestines is available. Thus, a large number of foods and their components derived from plants such as JBOVS may have undiscovered human health benefits. Candidate functional and prebiotic foods are usually learn more evaluated using in vitro cell assays and/or animal experiments in mice and rats. Animal experiments, however, are generally time-consuming and present several ethical issues. With this in mind, it was envisaged that a simple and rapid

in vitro method involving the use of in vitro cell assays would be a much more suitable method for the screening of functional and prebiotic foods. Therefore the objective of this study was to develop a simple and rapid in vitro evaluation method for AZD9291 mw screening and discovery of uncharacterised and untapped prebiotic foods. To accomplish this objective,

a metabolomic approach was employed, which is a powerful tool well suited to provide metabolic profiles that contain information pertaining to the ecosystem and community response. Multivariate metabolic profiling offers a practical approach for measuring the metabolic endpoints that are directly linked to whole system activity ( Nicholson, Holmes, & Wilson, 2005). In addition to this, some approaches, including our developed methods, have been successfully applied to characterising the metabolic consequences of nutritional intervention, monitoring the metabolic dynamics in microbial ecosystems, and linking the relationships Selleck Decitabine between microbial communities and their metabolic information ( Date et al., 2010, Li et al., 2008 and Rezzi et al., 2007). Herein we describe an in vitro evaluation method for a rapid and simple screening of candidate prebiotic foods and their components. The JBOVS and other foods and their components were evaluated by an in vitro screening method based on the metabolic dynamics of microbial communities obtained by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) fingerprinting. In addition, we characterised the chemical components in the JBOVS by NMR spectroscopy and inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES)/mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) analysis.