Development of a viability standard curve for microencapsulated probiotic bacteria using confocal microscopy and image analysis software

•Viability standard curve for microencapsulated bacteria using confocal microscopy, fluorescent dyes and image analysis.•Real-time viability of microencapsulated bacteria can be determined using this method.•Confocal analysis revealed probiotic bacteria are distributed throughout the capsules.

Microencapsulation is proposed to protect probiotic strains from food processing procedures and to maintain probiotic viability. Little research has described the in situ viability of microencapsulated probiotics. This study successfully developed a real-time viability standard curve for microencapsulated bacteria using confocal microscopy, fluorescent dyes and image analysis software.