Imagine a paleontologist digging up a fossil of a 250-million-year-old organism, perfectly preserved, that wakes up as fresh as it did millions of years ago when it went dormant. It sounds like a prologue to a dinosaur science fiction movie about bad ideas, but it is a completely real discovery of Bacillus spores in a salt crystal. Bacillus bacteria now hold the record for the oldest living creatures ever discovered, and they are in almost every ecosystem in the world – especially water and soil.
They come from a family on the taxonomic tree called Firmicutes, which means “strong skin” in Latin, and they hold true to their name in every sense. They have a tough Gram-positive outer cell wall, as well as their ability to form natural dormant endospores – the key to their multi-million-year hibernation. Endospores, also called spores, were studied extensively in the 1870s by Ferdinand Cohn, who discovered their ability to preserve their DNA when the environment is inhospitable. The spore form of Bacillus is part of what makes them great probiotics, since products with Bacillus spores can be on a shelf, or in a salt crystal, or in an ancient Egyptian tomb for years and not lose their ability to grow
Bacillus spores keep on the shelf, but vegetative Bacillus do all the work. Activation is the bridge between them.
Bacillus are also fantastic probiotics because they’ve been in our natural microbiome from the very beginning. Thousands of years ago, humans were farming and gathering food from soil rich in Bacillus bacteria, and the ancestors to modern livestock were rooting, pecking, and eating grass from the same soil. Bacillus have always been involved in gut health, now ACTPRO™ Technology is able to bring the natural benefits of Bacillus back into human and animal microbiomes with activated probiotics. Our ACTPRO system combines a blend of Bacillus bacteria selected for their probiotic benefits, our patent-pending nutrient blend, and the conditions to make these sturdy spores become activated to provide direct benefits throughout the intestinal system.
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