Abstract

The relationship between certain foods and their potential health-promoting ability has been investigated formany years. Development of such foods is one of the key priorities for research in food industry together with the search forinnovative substrates and formulations. In this frame, plant-derived matrix, such as cereals and fruits, represent a partiallyunexplored field. The aim of this work was to verify the ability of different plant-derived raw materials and juices to supportbacterial viability, particularly human-derived lactobacilli strains, investigating the prebiotic potential as well as thepossibility to introduce an improved generation of functional products. Our findings suggest that many matrices could beused for this purpose but, among all the strains we tested, Lactobacillus plantarum revealed the best performing features.