The idea is that although prebiotics may have many different effects in the human gut, some of these may be quantified and combined to an overall score.
Measure of the prebiotic effect (MPE) is a quantitative analysis that takes into an account a number of dominant bacterial groups and end products of fermentation such as short-chain fatty acids (SCFA) and substrate assimilation.
[2] MPE was developed by Jelena Vulevic[3] in conjunction with Glenn R Gibson and Robert Rastall and sponsored by Novartis Consumer Health[4] Several quantitative approaches have been developed to aid in the analysis of prebiotics and their individual and collective activity within the gut microbiome.
These approaches are in part used to calculate the Measure of the Prebiotic Effect or (MPE).
[5] The Prebiotic Index equation takes into account bifidobacteria (Bif), bacteroides (Bac), lactobacilli (Lac), and clostridia (Clos):