A new natural source for obtainment of inulin and fructo-oligosaccharides from industrial waste of Stevia rebaudiana Bertoni.

Fructan-type inulin and fructo-oligosaccharides (FOS) are reserve polysaccharides that offer an interesting combination of nutritional and technological properties for food industry. Stevia rebaudiana is used commercially in the sweetener industry due to the high content of steviol glycosides in its leaves. With the proposal of using industrial waste, the objective of the present study was to isolate, characterize and evaluate the prebiotic activity of inulin and FOS from S. rebaudiana stems. The chemical characterization of the samples by GC-MS, NMR and off-line ESI-MS showed that it was possible to obtain inulin molecules from the S. rebaudiana stems with a degree of polymerization (DP) of 12, and FOS with a DP<6. The in vitro prebiotic assay of these molecules indicates a strain specificity in fermentation capacity of fructans as substrate. FOS molecules with a low DP are preferably fermented by beneficial microbiota than inulin molecules with higher DP.