Polyphenols and polyphenols-based biopolymer materials: Regulating iron absorption and availability from spontaneous to controllable

Abstract

Iron is an important trace element in the body, and it will seriously affect the body’s normal operation if it is taken too much or too little. A large number of patients around the world are suffering from iron disorders. However, there are many problems using drugs to treat iron overload and causing prolonged and unbearable suffering for patients. Controlling iron absorption and utilization through diet is becoming the acceptable, safe and healthy method. At present, many literatures have reported that polyphenols can interact with iron ions and can be expected to chelate iron ions, depending on their types and structures. Besides, polyphenols often interact with other macromolecules in the diet, which may complicate this phenols-Fe behavior and give rise to the necessity of building phenolic based biopolymer materials. The biopolymer materials, constructed by self-assembly (non-covalent) or chemical modification (covalent), show excellent properties such as good permeability, targeting, biocompatibility, and high chelation ability. It is believed that this review can greatly facilitate the development of polyphenols-based biopolymer materials construction for regulating iron and improving the well-being of patients.

Keywords:

• Chelation
• chemical modification
• polysaccharide
• protein
• self-assembly

Authors’ contribution

Yafei Zhang contributed to writing original draft and writing review & editing. Xiaojing Tian and Wenhang Wang contributed to conceptualization, data curation and funding acquisition. Anguo Teng and Yu Li contributed to formal Analysis, investigation and methodology. Yuzhen Jiao, Kaixuan Zhao helped resources and software. Yang Wang contributed to supervision. Ruonan Li and Ning Yang contributed to validation and visualization.

Disclosure statement

We had obtained all copyright permission in this review to reproduce the images, schemes, and tables from another article. We had full access to all of the data in this review and we take complete responsibility for the integrity of the data. In addition, we declared that we have no conflicts of interest to this work. We declare that we do not have any commercial or associative interest that represents a conflict of interest in connection with the work submitted.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32102052, 32172249).