Editorial: Probiotics for global health: advances, applications and challenges

In recent decades, probiotics have become a central focus in biomedical and nutritional sciences due to their ability to support host health, prevent disease, and counteract dysbiosis. Given the rising global burden of diseases, there is an urgent need for safe, sustainable, and accessible interventions to complement conventional therapies. Probiotics, defined as live microorganisms that confer a health benefit when administered in adequate amounts, represent a promising strategy to improve public health across diverse populations and life stages. This Research Topic was conceived to examine the role of probiotics in advancing global health and contributing to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG3): "Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages." The contributions published here highlight the multifaceted impact of probiotics on human well-being, spanning infectious disease prevention, management of chronic conditions, maternal and infant health, mental health, and the mitigation of antimicrobial resistance.A consistent theme is the ability of probiotics to reduce pathogen colonization, enhance mucosal defenses, and modulate immune responses, offering cost-effective approaches to alleviating infectious disease in vulnerable populations. Probiotics also help manage non-communicable diseases like cancer, cardiovascular disorders, diabetes, and obesity by modulating metabolism, reducing inflammation, and strengthening the gut barrier. Probiotic interventions further support maternal health and infant development, while early-life supplementation can reduce the risk of neonatal infections, allergies, and gastrointestinal disorders.Probiotics are increasingly studied in the gut-brain axis, with evidence of their impact on neurotransmitters, neuroinflammation, and stress. Finally, their contribution to combating antimicrobial resistance (AR) emphasizes their global relevance for both medicine and agriculture.Taken together, this Research Topic synthesizes recent advances, highlighting both opportunities and challenges of probiotic science, and underscores their potential to transform preventive health strategies and therapeutic interventions in line with global health priorities.Current Research Topic brought together 31 unique contributions, collectively illustrating the breadth and diversification of probiotic research (Table 1). A clear taxonomic pattern emerges, reflecting both the maturity of classical probiotic investigations and the growing interest in non-traditional microbial candidates.The Lactobacillus lineage, including Lacticaseibacillus, Limosilactobacillus, and Lactiplantibacillus species, was by far the most represented group. Twelve studies, presented, for example, by Wang et al.; Kiousi et al.; Dong et al., Zhang et al., account for almost 39% of the collected works. Their predominance reflects long-standing GRAS status of lactobacilli, resilience in gastrointestinal environments, immunomodulatory mechanisms, and wide availability in food and pharmaceutical markets.By contrast, only two articles specifically addressed the genus Bifidobacterium (Ma et al., 2024;Sarita et al., 2024), one of which is a general review covering multiple probiotics (Sarita et al., 2024). Despite the genus' central role in early-life microbiota, immune development, and pediatric health, this limited representation underscores both a gap and an opportunity for further exploration of bifidobacterial strains in clinical and nutritional contexts.Another single study was dedicated to Bacillus spore-formers, specifically Bacillus coagulans (Kallur et al., 2024). With its exceptional resistance to heat, acidity, and processing stress, B. coagulans is gaining recognition as a robust probiotic candidate for scalable food and nutraceutical applications.In addition, next-generation probiotics received initial but promising attention. An article examined Akkermansia muciniphila (Lu et al., 2024), reflecting the field's gradual shift toward precision microbiome modulation and individualized interventions for metabolic and inflammatory disorders.Finally, eight articles explored non-traditional and emerging taxa, including Enterococcus, Blautia, Weizmannella, and even fungal candidates such as Aspergillus. Examples include the characterization of Blautia producta for its anti-inflammatory effects (Chen et al., 2025) and Enterococcus casseliflavus for its safety profile and immunoregulatory potential (Li et al., 2025). These contributions highlight the expanding search for alternative probiotics beyond the traditional lactobacilli and bifidobacteria.Taken together, the taxonomic distribution across this Research Topic reveals a dual narrative: the continued centrality of lactobacilli as model probiotics on the one hand, and on the other, the diversification of microbial candidates that may offer novel solutions to global health challenges. This balance underscores how probiotic science is simultaneously building on established foundations while opening to innovation and expansion into underexplored taxa.A major portion of recent studies in this Research Topic focused on the diverse functional roles of lactobacilli, reaffirming their centrality in probiotic science and their evolution into models for nextgeneration functional and therapeutic interventions. L. reuteri has demonstrated immunomodulatory effects in allergic diseases, restoring Treg/Th17 balance and identifying luteolin as a key anti-inflammatory metabolite (Zhang et al., 2025). Genomic and safety evaluations of Lcb. paracasei and Lcb. casei confirmed absence of virulence and AR genes, supporting their use in food and nutraceutical applications (Chen et al., 2025). Similarly, Lpb. plantarum L19 exhibits strain-specific antioxidant and stress resistance traits, highlighting its potential to mitigate oxidative stress, for example under heat stress in livestock (Wang et al., 2024). Comprehensive analyses of Lcb. paracasei LC86 and Lcb. casei LC89 further confirmed their safety through genomic and phenotypic assessments and in vivo acute toxicity studies (Chen et al., 2025). Beyond gastrointestinal health, lactobacilli have shown potential to adsorb microplastics and reduce intestinal accumulation and inflammation (Teng et al., 2025), and to reinforce the host-pathogen interface by reducing Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli adhesion and epithelial cell death (Kiousi et al., 2024). Encapsulation of probiotics and synbiotics has been highlighted as a strategy to enhance survival and expand applications in immune, metabolic, and neurological health (Sarita et al., 2024). Mechanistic studies on Lacticaseibacillus rhamnosus LRa05 showed modulation of cytokines, oxidative stress, and gut microbiota, while engineering of Lcb. paracasei EG005 to enhance superoxide dismutase activity illustrates precision probiotics with tailored antioxidant capacity (Dong et al., 2024;Kim et al., 2024). Other strains demonstrated targeted health effects, including prevention of constipation via microbiota modulation by Lcb. rhamnosus Glory LG12 (Ma et al., 2025), biofilm formation and antioxidant activity of Ligilactobacillus salivarius LS-ARS2 (Patra et al., 2025), and mitigation of heat stress in dairy cows by Lpb. plantarum L19 (Wang et al., 2024). Lpb. plantarum strains ONU 12 and ONU 355, along with Lcb. casei ATCC 393, inhibited hepatocellular carcinoma and cholangiocarcinoma cell proliferation, synergized with chemotherapeutics, and induced apoptosis and senescence (Duduyemi et al., 2024). Lcb. casei KACC92338 exhibited antioxidant, stress-tolerance, and antimicrobial properties with genomic safety, highlighting its probiotic potential (Kandasamy et al., 2024).These studies confirm the central role of lactobacilli while showing their expanding applications, from allergy and oncology to environmental health, within the broader One Health framework.The genus Bifidobacterium is a cornerstone of the gut microbiota in early life and remains a central focus in probiotic research due to its strain-specific roles in maintaining intestinal and systemic health. Among the reviewed works, Bifidobacterium spp. demonstrates key physiological effects including enhancement of mucosal barrier integrity, immune modulation, and antagonism toward pathogenic microbes. These studies highlight diverse therapeutic potential, ranging from the alleviation of metabolic and neuroinflammatory markers to the improvement of inflammatory bowel disease when Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lacti XLTG11 was combined with mesalazine, resulting in superior anti-inflammatory and microbiota-modulating effects compared to either treatment alone. Furthermore, several works explore synergistic combinations of Bifidobacterium spp. with other probiotics/prebiotics (Ma et al., 2024), suggesting that multi-strain or synbiotic formulations may provide enhanced outcomes. Taken together, the current evidence consolidates the position of Bifidobacterium spp. as crucial contributors to gut-brain and gut-immune homeostasis, underlining their future relevance in both clinical and functional food applications.Seidler et al. provided a comprehensive review of the postbiotic potential of Aspergillus oryzae, traditionally used in East Asian food fermentation, highlighting its ability to modulate the gut microbiome, enhance epithelial barrier function, influence immune responses, and impact metabolic and neural signaling. This work underscores the translational potential of fungal-derived postbiotics for gut health and related therapeutic interventions, while emphasizing the importance of standardization and quality control. Blautia producta 1009924, isolated from human feces, exhibits notable probiotic potential (Chen et al., 2025). In a DSS-induced zebrafish intestinal inflammation model, it reduced ROS production, modulated TLR4/NF-κB signaling, decreased pro-inflammatory cytokines, and e