In-vitro Transit Tolerance of Probiotic Bacillus species in Human Gastrointestinal Tract

The present work describes the tolerance of five potential probiotic Bacillus species towards acid and bile in human gastrointestinal tract by in-vitro studies. Artificial gastric and intestinal juice was prepared and adjusted to different pH values for acid and bile tolerance study. A time course analysis up to 4 hours was studied with respect to viability. There was a statistically significant growth response of isolates under high acidic conditions (p less than 0.05) as confirmed by ANOVA test. Bacillus VS-5 was found to be the best with 98.78 % survival rate for 3 hours exposure to pH 1.2 and 98.10 % to 2 % bile concentration when exposed for 4 hours. Considering the residence time of food in stomach and intestine, this isolate proves to have an advantage of surviving and also proliferating in the intestinal tract, which is a desirable characteristic of probiotic cultures.