“…To date, a number of drying approaches have been investigated for their feasibility as an alternative to the freeze drying process, with the aim of obtaining highly viable and long-term maintained microbial culture in the dry form. These approaches include spray drying (Corcoran, Ross, Fitzgerald, & Stanton, 2004;Gardiner et al, 2000;Reddy, Madhu, & Prapulla, 2009;Teixeira, Castro, Malcata, & Kirby, 1995), fluidized bed drying (Bayrock & Ingledew, 1997a;Mille, Girard, Beney, & Gervais, 2005;Strasser, Neureiter, Geppl, Braun, & Danner, 2009), vacuum drying (Santivarangkna, Kulozik, & Foerst, 2006;Tymczyszyn, del Rosario Diaz, Gomez-Zavaglia, & Disalvo, 2007a), thermal convective air-drying in an oven Friesen, Hill, Pugsley, Holloway, & Zimmerman, 2005;, tunnel drying (Alpas, Ozilgen, Bozoglu, & Katnas, 1996) and spouted-bed drying (Oliveira et al, 2007). The strains involved and some results obtained in these studies are summarized in Table 2.…”