Leveraging budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae for discovering aging modulation substances for functional food

Shaoyu Wang, Shujie Zhang

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Functional food has been a practical mean to be used for health promotion and morbidity compression in the aging population. The discovery and development of bioactive substances with aging modulation actions are critical steps for more potent and safer functional food for aging modulation. Budding yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), as a single-cell eukaryotic organism, displays genes, molecular and cellular mechanisms conserved with mammalians. It is a well-developed model for replicative and chronological aging in mammalians. This mode organism, with its amenability by genetic and molecular tools, have thus served well for discovering bioactive compounds for aging modulation and health promotion of a variety of age-related health conditions in humans.In this paper, we have, by synthesizing existing literature, summarized the characteristics of the budding yeast as a practical model for aging for mammalians including humans, then conceptualized a framework for discovering bioactive compounds using yeast cellular system for aging modulations for functional food research and industry. This framework consists offour components: uncovering targets for aging modulation, discovering and validating diet restriction mimetics, acting as cellular systems for screening natural products or synthetic compounds for aging modulation and being a biological factory for producing bioactive compounds according to the roles the yeast systems play. While these four components are continuously being harnessed in both research and industry, the last component of being abiological factory for producing bioactive compounds has largely unexplored, thus presenting a novel opportunity for the functional food industry.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)297-311
Number of pages15
JournalFunctional Foods in Health and Disease
Volume9
Issue number5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 31 May 2019

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