Aim of this issue will be to focus on some aspects of nutrition with functional foods, facing with aspects ranging from industrial production to basic science, as fermentation of food matrices, source of valuable functional metabolites, the study of digestion of these foods and the design and selection of cellular models of intestine.

Fermentation, one of the oldest biotechnological process, has been used to improve quality and health benefit of food since past times. In fact many metabolites produced during the fermentation process can increase the functionality of food that have important effects on health including the increase of the immunological response. We will collect contributions to have a detailed up-to-date snapshot, from the academic and industrial point of views, on biothecnological processes used to obtain probiotic and postbiotic functional foods.

The digestion process is nodal to understand the real bioavailability of these metabolites for the intestinal mucosa. How these functional metabolites are modified by the digestive process is not fully explored and a matter of discussion of academics. We will invite contributions from researchers involved in the field.

Finally how these functional metabolites can interact with the intestinal mucosa and improve health is the final step to study the real effectiveness of the functional foods. To clarify this, many cellular models are available to mimic the intestine, from cells to mini-guts derived from intestinal staminal cells. But the real issue is to find read outs that can be effectively related to the health benefit due to the functional metabolites.

Around these aspects, we would like to coagulate the best researchers to have a deeply clarification on more efficient models, techniques, procedures and read-outs to be used.

Aims and Scope: