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

Aggrecan, a main element of proteoglycan (PG) having chondroitin sulfate (CS) in cartilaginous tissues, has grow to be ever more common as an component in well being meals. In point, proteoglycans from salmon nasal cartilage demonstrate organic properties these as antiaging, inhibition of angiogenesis, and attenuation of inflammatory responses. Commercially offered chondroitin sulfate proteoglycans (CSPGs) have only been well prepared from salmon nasal cartilage. While the head cartilage was identified in other edible bony fishes, there is minor data on the composition of main proteins and their CS buildings in the head cartilage.

Now, in a new research published in the Intercontinental 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 Source Science tackles this problem. “We identified that composition of PGs and their CS structure in the skull of the Siberian sturgeon and Russian sturgeon were identical to that in the salmon nasal cartilage,” reports Dr. Higashi. The fishes for the study were being furnished by Mr. Atsuhi Nakamura from Miyazaki Prefectural Fisheries Study Institute. This research was manufactured readily available on-line on March 23, 2022 and was released in Volume 208 of the journal on Could 31, 2022.

All the fishes examined contained plentiful CSPGs in the head cartilage. Comprehensive investigation of CS construction in PGs derived from 10 bony fishes unveiled that the construction of CS derived from Perciformes ended up comparable to that of CS derived from cartilage of terrestrial animals. On the other hand, the framework of CS from skull of sturgeons was similar to that of CS from salmon nasal cartilage. In addition, they also identified that aggrecan, a important CSPG in the cartilaginous tissue, was conserved in 10 bony fishes.  In actuality, the aggrecan protein from LOC117428125 and LOC117964296 genes registered in the National Center for Biotechnology Info databases was found to be ample in the skull of sturgeons. Furthermore, compositions of other PGs, collagens, and matrix proteins in the cranium of sturgeons were being very similar to that of salmon nasal cartilage.

Elaborating on the findings of this study, Dr. Kyohei Higashi states that “head cartilage from bony fishes is an underutilized useful resource and is ordinarily discarded soon after foods processing. The PGs, primarily from the sturgeon, are related in CS composition to the salmon nasal cartilage, exhibiting that the sturgeon has a great deal of likely to be an option source of CSPGs for overall health foods formulations.”