Many bacteria synthesize extracellular polysaccharides (EPSs) with commercially significant physiological and therapeutic activities. Microbial polysaccharides have also been reported to have potential therapeutic applications. Recently, much attention has been devoted to the microbial exopolysaccharides (EPSs) due to their numerous health beneûts.EPSs from lactic acid bacteria are reported to possess antitumor effects, immunostimulatory activity, and the ability to lower blood cholesterol. EPSs also over an alternative class of biothickeners that are widely used in the food and dairy industries and have been proven to provide strong emulsifying activity, which is important in many food formulations. It is also important to understand the mechanism of microbial biosynthesis of EPSs in order to enhance their production by genetic alterations. The potential applications and the mode of microbial biosynthesis of the EPSs have been presented in this article.
Bacterial polysaccharides that are secreted into the environment are termed as exopolysaccharides (EPSs). Depending on the monosaccharide composition, EPSs can be classified into homo (HoPSs) and heteropolysaccharides (HePSs). HoPSs consist of only one type of monosaccharide, mostly glucose or fructose. In the recent years, EPSs have drawn increasing attention of the researchers worldwide, not only for their thickening, texturizing and viscosifying properties, but also for their health promoting applications. These EPSs constitute an alternative class of biothickeners, which have also been proved to have good emulsifying property, apart from their texture promoting ability in various foods. The biochemical properties of the EPSs depend on the primary structure of the EPSs. Hence it is very important to know the monomeric composition of the EPSs and their gycosidic bonds. HPLC, GC, GC-MS, NMR, Capillary electrophoresis and various bioinformatics tools can be used to determine the chemical characteristics of the EPSs.
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