earticle

영어

Isoflavones, a family of the major groups of phytoestrogens, are known to have anticarcinogenic, antioxidant and photoprotective effects. Although they have beneficial bioactivities for human health, low bioavailability and poor solubility have been problems in applications. To address this problems, we first have optimized large-scale conditions for enzymatic bio-conversion
of crude isoflavone glycosides(≤20%) from soybean into aglycones by using a β-glucosidase. Further purification processes enabled us to obtain more than 90% purity of isoflavone aglycones analyzed by HPLC. The purified isoflavone showed to a have strong anti-inflammation activity. UVB irradiation of HaCaT cells induced tumor necrotic factor-α (TNF-α)production by 3
folds but the treatment of the purified isoflavone reduced TNF-α production back to the normal level. In order to make derivatives of isoflavone, which might have novel bioactivities with better solubility, acylation reactions of the purified isoflavone were first performed and the resulting isoflavone derivatives were purified for further analyses. Especially, mono-palmitoyl isoflavone not only reduced TNF-α production at much lower concentration than that of isoflavone aglycone, but showed increased solubility by 10 folds compared with isoflavone aglycone. Our results show that mono-palmitoyl isoflavone can potentially enhance bioavailability of isoflavone due to increased solubility and bioactivity.