Fishing for a new source of proteoglycans, an important health food ingredient

Aggrecan, a key part of proteoglycan (PG) possessing chondroitin sulfate (CS) in cartilaginous tissues, has grow to be ever more common as an component in well being foods. In point, proteoglycans from salmon nasal cartilage show organic properties this sort of as antiaging, inhibition of angiogenesis, and attenuation of inflammatory responses. Commercially out there chondroitin sulfate proteoglycans (CSPGs) have only been organized from salmon nasal cartilage. Whilst the head cartilage was located in other edible bony fishes, there is small info on the composition of core proteins and their CS buildings in the head cartilage.

Now, in a new research revealed in the International Journal of Biology Macromolecules, a group of researchers led by Associate Professor Kyohei Higashi of Tokyo University of Science, and Dr. Naoshi Dohmae and Dr. Takehiro Suzuki of the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Useful resource Science tackles this issue. “We observed that composition of PGs and their CS structure in the skull of the Siberian sturgeon and Russian sturgeon were related to that in the salmon nasal cartilage,” reports Dr. Higashi. The fishes for the review were being supplied by Mr. Atsuhi Nakamura from Miyazaki Prefectural Fisheries Research Institute. This examine was built offered on the internet on March 23, 2022 and was revealed in Volume 208 of the journal on May possibly 31, 2022.

All the fishes examined contained ample CSPGs in the head cartilage. Detailed assessment of CS construction in PGs derived from 10 bony fishes discovered that the construction of CS derived from Perciformes had been related to that of CS derived from cartilage of terrestrial animals. On the other hand, the construction of CS from skull of sturgeons was identical to that of CS from salmon nasal cartilage. In addition, they also uncovered that aggrecan, a main CSPG in the cartilaginous tissue, was conserved in 10 bony fishes.  In point, the aggrecan protein from LOC117428125 and LOC117964296 genes registered in the Countrywide Middle for Biotechnology Facts database was located to be considerable in the cranium of sturgeons. Furthermore, compositions of other PGs, collagens, and matrix proteins in the cranium of sturgeons were very similar to that of salmon nasal cartilage.

Elaborating on the findings of this analyze, Dr. Kyohei Higashi suggests that “head cartilage from bony fishes is an underutilized source and is typically discarded right after food stuff processing. The PGs, primarily from the sturgeon, are equivalent in CS composition to the salmon nasal cartilage, exhibiting that the sturgeon has a whole lot of likely to be an choice source of CSPGs for wellbeing food stuff formulations.”