Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast Ecosystems for the development of Probiotic Extracellular Vesicles

Fermented foods are used for many centuries all over the world for their contribution to longevity and digestive health.

Regular consumption of fermented foods can combat dysbiosis and boost hosts immune response against various pathogens and associated diseases. However, they increase the microbiome of the digestive tract and can have adverse effects on immunosuppressed patients.

Rather than single-strain probiotics, we will study Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast Ecosystem (SCOBY) derived biomembrane-delimited nanostructures to obtain similar or enhanced beneficial effects.

To that end, extracellular vesicles (EVs) harvested from kombucha, a fermented beverage based on tea and sugar produced with a SCOBY will be exploited for their antimicrobial properties against gastrointestinal bacterial infections and food-borne bacterial pathogens.The experienced researcher is a microbiologist with strong academic background in the field of microbiology, infectious diseases, and bioinformatics who will team-up with the Institute of Biosciences and BioResources with considerable expertise in EV research to carry out a uniquely interdisciplinary research program.

The research will realize the following objectives: 1. to set-up and optimize kombucha SCOBY cultures for the production of EVs, 2. to study the role of SCOBY-derived EVs in interspecies communication and their impact on gastrointestinal bacterial pathogens, and 3. to synthetize molecularly imprinted polymers specific for the enrichment of SCOBY-EVs.

To our knowledge, none of these objectives has been addressed before and they all have the potential to expand the knowledge in the field and drive the research towards biotechnology applications in health and disease.

The research objectives are integrated with concerted training objectives in EV research, mass spectrometry, MIPs design and synthesis, outreach program, dissemination events and considerable knowledge transfer in microbiology from the researcher.