Recently, there has been a growing interest in producing functional foods containing encapsulated probiotic bacteria due to their positive effects on human health. According to their perceived health benefits, probiotics have been incorporated into a range of dairy products, but the current major challenge is to market new, multicomponent probiotic foods and supplements. Nevertheless, only a few products containing encapsulated probiotic cells can be found as non-refrigerated products. In this work, spray drying technology was investigated in order to produce an innovative nutraceutical formulation based on lactic acid bacteria (LAB), and was able to ensure a good storage stability of probiotics (no less than 109 CFU/cps) in non-refrigerated conditions. Probiotic-loaded microparticles from spray drying experiments were produced under different conditions and compared by thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and the enumeration of the number of viable cells in order to identify the formulation exhibiting the most promising characteristics. Results from the dissolution test revealed that the optimized formulation provides a suitable amount of living cells after digestion of microparticles stored for 12 months at room temperature and confirmed that the microencapsulation process by spray drying ensures a good protection of probiotics for nutraceutical purposes.

Advances in on-line thermally induced evolved gas analysis (OLTI-EGA) have been systematically reported by our group to update their applications in several different fields and to provide useful starting references. The importance of an accurate interpretation of the thermally-induced reaction mechanism which involves the formation of gaseous species is necessary to obtain the characterization of the evolved products. In this review, applications of Evolved Gas Analysis (EGA) performed by on-line coupling heating devices to mass spectrometry (EGA-MS), are reported. Reported references clearly demonstrate that the characterization of the nature of volatile products released by a substance subjected to a controlled temperature program allows us to prove a supposed reaction or composition, either under isothermal or under heating conditions. Selected 2019, 2020, and 2021 references are collected and briefly described in this review.

The on-line thermally induced evolved gas analysis (OLTI-EGA) is widely applied in many different fields. Aimed to update the applications, our group has systematically collected and published examples of EGA characterizations. Following the recently published review on EGA-MS applications, this second part reviews the latest applications of Evolved Gas Analysis performed by on-line coupling heating devices to infrared spectrometers (EGA-FTIR). The selected 2019, 2020, 2021 and early 2022 references are collected and briefly described in this review; these are useful to help researchers to easily find applications that are sometimes difficult to locate.