Amorepacific Group opens Green Tea Probiotics Research Center

-To advance research of green tea strain found in Jeju organic tea garden and development of innovative products

-To expand globally competitive microorganism research as well as its related technologies

News provided by

Feb 18, 2020, 19:30 ET

SEOUL, South Korea, Feb. 18, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Amorepacific R&D Center opened Green Tea Probiotics Research Center to deepen the study of lactobacillus newly found in Jeju organic green tea garden and to continue the development of innovative products in microorganisms and other fields.

Amorepacific has been cultivating one million pyeong (about 3.3 million square meters) of organic green tea farm in Jeju, Korea.

Amorepacific R&D Center started its research of green tea in the 1980s and expanded the research scope to include a new variety of green tea with skin benefits in the 2000s. It has also continued to research the characteristics of skin, scalp and hair including microorganisms since 1997. Finally in 2010, Amorepacific R&D Center was able to discover a green tea probiotic strain (namely Lactobacillus plantarum (APsulloc)), which facilitates green tea fermentation, from richly flavored, fermented green tea leaves from green tea grown organically in Jeju Island.

Of particular note, it is found that this newly discovered a probiotic strain survives and persists better in the intestinal tract than conventional strains and has excellent antibacterial, antibiotic resistant property according to genome analysis. Amorepacific R&D Center collaborated with Professor Dr. Wilhelm Heinrich Holzapfel, one of the world's most renowned scholars in the field of gut microbiota and published the findings in the SCI-grade journal 'Probiotics and Antimicrobial Proteins' last November. (Paper titled Safety Evaluation and Whole-Genome Annotation of Lactobacillus Plantarum Strains from Different Sources with Special Focus on Isolates from Green Tea). This joint research also confirmed that the probiotic strain from green tea leaves originally discovered by Amorepacific Group decreases the level of inflammation factors in the stomach.

Amorepacific R&D Center will continue to demonstrate the effects of this probiotic strain and develop innovative products using it in health food, cosmetics and other fields through the new Green Tea Probiotics Research Center. Furthermore, it will expand the area of research, specifically into microbiomes, which refer to microorganisms living in the human body and their genetic information.

Meanwhile, Amorepacific R&D Center opened the Anti-pollution Research Center and the Sulwhasoo Herbal Medicinal Science Research Center in 2019 to enhance research competence. It will continue with its best R&D efforts to deliver the best quality products to customers with its unrivaled technological prowess.

SOURCE Amorepacific