An Insight into the Salutary Prospect of the Probiotic Microorganisms for the Remediation of Mercury Toxicity

Abstract

Heavy metal toxicity imposes a potential worldwide threat to environment and humans. Mercury toxicity is regarded as a serious global community health risk, as there is no particular and proven treatment for chronic mercury toxicity. Probiotics include the live apathogenic microorganisms, which are administered orally to revamp the gut microbial equilibrium thus bestowing benefit to the host. Scientific literature demonstrates different probiotic microorganisms can obviate mercurey toxicity. The present article puts together the experiments on probiotics with mercury toxicity alleviation effects in pursuit of the mechanistic hypotheses. Literature scrutiny was performed by using online bibliographic databases. Literature survey revealed that, eight types of probiotic microorganisms demonstrated significant protection from mercury toxicity in experimental pre-clinical studies. Clinical investigation with noteworthy outcome was not reported yet. Results of these studies indicate that probiotic microorganisms may hold the promise in amelioration and therapeutics of mercury toxicity. Probiotic supplementation may serve as a dietary therapeutic approach against mercurials along with extant therapies.