Health promoting benefits of postbiotics produced by lactic acid bacteria: Exopolysaccharide

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Exopolysaccharides are high molecular weight polymers of repeated sugar units with diverse chemical structure and unique properties and produced by microorganisms. Lactic acid bacteria are important exopolysaccharide producers. Lactic acid bacteria derived exopolysaccharides, one of the postbiotics, are known to have technological properties such as stabilizing, thickening, emulsifing and also biological activities. Lactic acid bacteria can synthesis exopolysaccharides with large structural variability and this diversity brings these polymers to possess several bioactivities. Bioactivities such as immunomodulatory, antiinflammatory, antitumor and antimutagenicity, antioxidant, antibacterial and antiviral, cholesterol-lowering, antihypertensive activity and gastro-protective activity bring these biopolymers commercial value in the global market and potential to be used in biomedical and pharmaceutical applications. Therefore, to evaluate the availability of these natural exopolysaccharides for new applications extensive understanding of the structure-function relationships will be required. In this review, it is presented a comprehensive overview for the most recent reports on the health benefits of postbiotic lactic acid bacterial exopolysaccharides.