Digestion and absorption of food: usefulness and limitations of in vitro models

Abstract

The digestion and absorption of food is a spatiotemporal and dynamic process involving complex enzymatic and transport reactions, and it is illusive to try to reproduce in a single model all these biochemical and physiological events. A more practical and realistic approach is to separately evaluate the specific contributions of oral and gastric digestion, intestinal digestion by pancreatic enzymes, brush-border hydrolysis, and eventually intestinal absorption and enterocyte metabolism. The models proposed must be versatile enough to be able to modify their conditions of operation according to physiological adaptation to food. Enzymatic preparations must be kept close to physiological conditions in regard to their nature and their mode of operation. A digestion cell and a peptidase bioreactor were developed for this purpose. The challenge is to find a way to integrate all these data. This can be partially achieved by selecting techniques that allow the collection and isolation of reaction products from one step for use as substrates for the next event. Various models are presented to illustrate this concept as applied to food protein.Key words: digestion, proteolysis, in vitro models, amino acid release, kinetics of digestion.