Abstract: Polysaccharides are the essential component in many kinds of artificial foods, applied as thickener, suspending agent or gelatinizing agent. Those polysaccharides usually come from higher plants, algae or some kinds of mushrooms. Recently, great attentions are paid to bacterial polysaccharides because of their stable structure and function, inexpensive price and low dosage in use. In this paper, existing exploitations and application foreground in food industry by using several bacterial polysaccha- rides were introduced, including the structure, characteristic and synthesis pathway of bacterial polysaccharides as well as their applications in food industry. Finally, developing trends of bacteria polysaccharides were prospected.

Key words: bacteria, polysaccharide, food, application