ntervention study to assess the effect of probiotic Lactobacillus paracasei DG on the intestinal microbiota of healthy adults.

Because of a lack of consensually accepted and validated biomarkers, it is difficult to assess the health benefits of probiotics in a healthy population. The impact of a probiotic product on the composition of gut microbiota is thus the initial research target for any evaluation of a probiotic’s efficacy. We report here the results of an intervention study called PROBIOTA-DG, which sought to assess the modifications induced in the fecal microbiota of healthy adults by the consumption of a commercial probiotic product. Specifically, we used Ion Torrent PGM high-throughput DNA sequencing technology according to a randomized, double-blind, crossover, placebo-controlled study design to characterize the fecal microbiota composition of healthy subjects after four weeks of daily consumption of one capsule of a probiotic supplement containing 24 billion viable cells of Lactobacillus paracasei DG per capsule.