Akhlash P. Singh

By Akhlash P. Singh and Sunil Kumar

Tannins are water-soluble natural polyphenols mainly present in plant-based materials, including food. Tannins play a very significant role as a raw material for sustainable green industries. Therefore, they are mainly used in diverse types of industries such as leather, feed, fisheries, beverages, etc. They also find application as potential medicinal agents, antioxidants, metal chelators; and cater as inhibitors of harmful pro-oxidative enzymes and of lipid peroxidation process. Recently, several important properties like antiseptics, anticarcinogenic, and anti-inflammatory of tannins have been documented in the human that make them suitable candidates for pharmaceuticals and nutraceutical industries. Because of current concerns related to synthetic compounds used in the human health and food industries, which leave highly adverse effects on the human body and environment, tannins can offer an alternative to these harmful chemicals in recently emerging industries.

Part of the book: Tannins

By Akhlash P. Singh

The human gut is the complex microbial ecosystem comprises more than 100 trillion microbes also known as microbiota. The gut microbiota does not only include about 400–500 types of bacterial strains, but it also contains archaea, bacteriophage, fungi, and protozoa species. In order to complete the characterization of the gut microbial community, we need the help of many culture-dependent and culture-independent genomic technologies. Recently, next-generation sequencing (NGS), mediated metagenomics that rely on 16S rRNA gene amplification, and whole-genome sequencing (WGS) have provided us deep knowledge related to important interactions such as host-microbiota and microbe-microbe interactions under various perturbation inside the gut. But, we still lack complete knowledge related to unique gene products encoded by gut meta-genome. Hence, it required the application of high-throughput “omics-based” methods to support metagenomics. Currently, a combination of high-throughput culturing and microfluidics assays is providing a new method to characterize non-amenable bacterial strains from the gut environment. The recent additions of artificial intelligence and deep learning to the area of microbiome studies have enhanced the capability of identification of thousand microbes simultaneously. Given above, it is necessary to apply new genome editing tools that can be used to design the personalized microflora which can be used to cure lifestyle-related diseases.

Part of the book: Human Microbiome