Emerging Technologies and Coating Materials for Improved Probiotication in Food Products: a Review.

From the past few decades, consumers' demand for probiotic-based functional and healthy food products is rising exponentially. Encapsulation is an emerging field to protect probiotics from unfavorable conditions and to deliver probiotics at the target place while maintaining the controlled release in the colon. Probiotics have been encapsulated for decades using different encapsulation methods to maintain their viability during processing, storage, and digestion and to give health benefits. This review focuses on novel microencapsulation techniques of probiotic bacteria including vacuum drying, microwave drying, spray freeze drying, fluidized bed drying, impinging aerosol technology, hybridization system, ultrasonication with their recent advancement, and characteristics of the commonly used polymers have been briefly discussed. Other than novel techniques, characterization of microcapsules along with their mechanism of release and stability have shown great interest recently in developing novel functional food products with synergetic effects, especially in COVID-19 outbreak. A thorough discussion of novel processing technologies and applications in food products with the incorporation of recent research works is the novelty and highlight of this review paper.

Ethyl Pyruvate as a Potential Defense Intervention against Cytokine Storm in COVID-19?

COVID-19 is a deadly pandemic and has resulted in a huge loss of money and life in the past few months. It is well known that the SARS-CoV-2 gene mutates relatively slowly as compared to other viruses but still may create hurdles in developing vaccines. Therefore, there is a need to develop alternative routes for its management and treatment of COVID-19. Based on the severity of viral infection in COVID-19 patients, critically ill patients (∼5%, with old age, and comorbidities) are at high risk of morbidities. The reason for this severity in such patients is attributed to "misleading cytokine storm", which produces ARDS and results in the deaths of critically ill patients. In this connection, ethyl pyruvate (EP) controls these cytokines/chemokines, is an anti-inflammatory agent, and possesses a protective effect on the lungs, brain, heart, and mitochondria against various injuries. Considering these facts, we propose that the site-selective EP formulations (especially aerosols) could be the ultimate adjuvant therapy for the regulation of misleading cytokine storm in severely affected COVID-19 patients and could reduce the mortalities.