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 atmosphere of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, exhibits interesting UV- and radiation-driven chemistry between nitrogen and methane, resulting in dipolar, nitrile-containing molecules. The assembly and subsequent solvation of such molecules in the alkane lakes and seas found on the moon's surface are of particular interest for investigating the possibility of prebiotic chemistry in Titan's hyd...

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...

Liquid formamide has been irradiated by high-energy proton beams in the presence of powdered meteorites, and the products of the catalyzed resulting syntheses were analyzed by mass spectrometry. Relative to the controls (no radiation, or no formamide, or no catalyst), an extremely rich, variegate, and prebiotically relevant panel of compounds was observed. The meteorites tested were representat...

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...

this study was conducted because of influence of prebiotics (alphamune) and symbiotic (biomin) on histometrical development of small intestine and lymphatic tissue of caecal tonsil have been not reported on broiler chicken. in this study, different parts of small intestine and caecal tonsil, which is a major area of gut associated lymphatic tissue (galt) in chicken were selected. one hundred an...