Background: Prebiotics have been shown to improve satiety in adults with overweight and obesity; however, studies in children are limited.Objective: We examined the effects of prebiotic supplementation on appetite control and energy intake in children with overweight and obesity.Design: This study was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. Forty-two boys and girls, ages 7-12 y, w...

Background: The need for more cost-effective compounds is imperative because the demand for prebiotic compounds is ever on the rise. Objective: The focus of this study is the purification of the endoxylanase from Bacillus pumilus B20 and its application in a cost-effective production of the prebiotic xylooligosaccharide (XOS) syrup having a high concentration of oligo...

P rebiotics have been defined recently more as a concept then a functional ingredient group: ‘The selective stimulation of growth and/or activity(ies) of one or a limited number of microbial genus(era)/ species in the gut microbiota that confer(s) health benefits to the host’. This definition has in common with earlier definitions that modulation of microbiota composition and/or activity is its...

The objective of this research was to investigate the efficacy of dietary inclusion of probiotics Primalac® and Bactocell® and prebiotic Fermacto® on broiler’s performance and immune response, individually or in combination. A total of 540 one-d-old male Ross 308 broiler chicks were allocated into 6 experimental treatments with 6 replicates of 15 birds per replicate from 1 to 42 d of age. The b...

Phosphorus is a key biologic element, and a prebiotic pathway leading to its incorporation into biomolecules has been difficult to ascertain. Most potentially prebiotic phosphorylation reactions have relied on orthophosphate as the source of phosphorus. It is suggested here that the geochemistry of phosphorus on the early Earth was instead controlled by reduced oxidation state phosphorus compou...

The RNA World hypothesis presupposes that abiotic reactions originally produced nucleotides, the monomers of RNA and universal constituents of metabolism. However, compatible prebiotic reactions for the synthesis of complementary (that is, base pairing) nucleotides and mechanisms for their mutual selection within a complex chemical environment have not been reported. Here we show that two plaus...

This work attempts to rationalize the possible prebiotic profile of the first dipeptides of about 4 billion years ago based on a computational discrete dynamic system that uses the final yields of the dipeptides obtained in Rode's experiments of salt-induced peptide formation (Rode et al., 1999, Peptides 20: 773-786). The system built a prebiotic scenario that allowed us to observe that (i) the...

This article discusses the hypothesized composition and organization of cytoplasm in prebiotic cells from a theoretical perspective and also based upon what is currently known about bacterial cytoplasm. It is unknown if the first prebiotic, microscopic scale, cytoplasm was initially contained within a primitive, continuous, semipermeable membrane, or was an uncontained gel substance, that later...