earticle

영어

Recently, many polysaccharides and oligosaccharides derived from marme seaweeds, plants, mushrooms, microorganisms as well as animals, have been attracting great attention due to their diverse range of beneficial effects on human health, such as anti-inflammatory, anti-viral, anti-coagulant, anti-tumor, and anti-metastatic, anti-oxidant, immuno-stimulating, anti-osteoporotic, anti-angiogenesis activities, etc. Among natural polysaccharides, sulfated polysaccharides (SPS) that contain hemi-ester sulfate groups in their sugar residues are commonly found in marine algae and have been target materials of numerous researches. Apart from industrial uses, these algal polysaccharides have emerged as a rich and important source of bioactive natural compounds, due to their diverse pharmacological activities and their availability in a relatively large amount from the raw source materials. On the other hand, although ginseng marc is a by-product obtained during manufacturing of various commercial ginseng products and has been routinely discarded as a waste, it still contains considerable amounts of polysaccharides. For these reasons, it would be worth evaluating various bioactivities and applications of these compounds for the development of new therapeutic agents or more value-added functional ingredients of health beneficial foods. However, it has been generally recognized that the innate structural variations and complexity, high molecular weights, and viscous nature of polysaccharides may limit their successful applications as health-beneficial food materials or therapeutic agents, suggesting that smaller-sized oligosaccharides would overcome these problems. Indeed, significant efforts have focused on preparing bioactive oligosaccharides from high-molecular weight polysaccharides (HMP), mmmg especially for their pharmaceutical usage. Therefore, a reliable polysaccharide-degrading enzyme preparation would be highly desirable to obtain lower-sized oligosaccharides and thereby help overcome these problems. In this context, we have isolated and purified polysaccharides from natural resources including Korean seaweeds and Korean ginseng roots and characterized their structures and biological activities such as immunomodulating, anti-viral, anti-coagulant, anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory, anti-obesity, anti-oxidant, anti-osteoporotic activities, etc. In addition, we also isolated and identified some enzyme activities that can degrade HMP, producing lower-sized oligosaccharides. This presentation will discuss about the structures and bioactivities, such as immunostimulating, anti-cancer, and anti-viral activities, of these polysaccharides and oligosaccharides derived from Korean seaweeds and gmseng. Their action mechanisms involved in their respective bioactivity will be discussed as well.