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

Aggrecan, a significant component of proteoglycan (PG) possessing chondroitin sulfate (CS) in cartilaginous tissues, has grow to be significantly popular as an component in wellness food items. In fact, proteoglycans from salmon nasal cartilage demonstrate biological properties this kind of as antiaging, inhibition of angiogenesis, and attenuation of inflammatory responses. Commercially out there chondroitin sulfate proteoglycans (CSPGs) have only been geared up from salmon nasal cartilage. Despite the fact that the head cartilage was found in other edible bony fishes, there is very little details on the composition of core proteins and their CS constructions in the head cartilage.

Now, in a new research released in the International Journal of Biology Macromolecules, a group of scientists led by Affiliate Professor Kyohei Higashi of Tokyo College of Science, and Dr. Naoshi Dohmae and Dr. Takehiro Suzuki of the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science tackles this concern. “We observed that composition of PGs and their CS structure in the skull of the Siberian sturgeon and Russian sturgeon ended up related to that in the salmon nasal cartilage,” studies Dr. Higashi. The fishes for the examine ended up provided by Mr. Atsuhi Nakamura from Miyazaki Prefectural Fisheries Study Institute. This study was manufactured readily available on line on March 23, 2022 and was posted in Volume 208 of the journal on May 31, 2022.

All the fishes examined contained abundant CSPGs in the head cartilage. Detailed evaluation of CS construction in PGs derived from 10 bony fishes uncovered that the structure of CS derived from Perciformes ended up related to that of CS derived from cartilage of terrestrial animals. On the other hand, the structure of CS from skull of sturgeons was identical to that of CS from salmon nasal cartilage. In addition, they also observed that aggrecan, a significant CSPG in the cartilaginous tissue, was conserved in 10 bony fishes.  In reality, the aggrecan protein from LOC117428125 and LOC117964296 genes registered in the Countrywide Middle for Biotechnology Facts database was found to be ample in the skull of sturgeons. Additionally, compositions of other PGs, collagens, and matrix proteins in the cranium of sturgeons were equivalent to that of salmon nasal cartilage.

Elaborating on the findings of this study, Dr. Kyohei Higashi suggests that “head cartilage from bony fishes is an underutilized useful resource and is usually discarded after food stuff processing. The PGs, in particular from the sturgeon, are related in CS construction to the salmon nasal cartilage, showing that the sturgeon has a great deal of probable to be an substitute supply of CSPGs for health food formulations.”