MINI REVIEW article
Front. Nutr.
Sec. Nutrition and Food Science Technology
This article is part of the Research TopicNanoencapsulation: Revolutionizing Nutraceuticals with Enhanced Bioavailability and EfficacyView all articles
Nature's Sophisticated Architecture: A Strategic Approach for Protein-Polysaccharide Complexes to Address the "Shelf-Life vs. Bioavailability" Dilemma of Polyphenols in Food Applications
Provisionally accepted
- 1Anhui Huatuo Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Bozhou, China
- 2The Affiliated Hospital of Changchun University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Changchun, China
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Polyphenols exhibit significant potential as functional food ingredients owing to their pronounced health-promoting effects. However, their practical application is substantially limited by a central technological dilemma: the trade-off between chemical instability during food processing and storage, and low bioavailability within the human gastrointestinal tract. This review focuses on a nature-derived, biocompatible, and sustainable strategy to address this challenge, which involves the use of molecular self-assembly between proteins and polysaccharides to construct nano-or micro-scale delivery systems. We systematically elucidate how these natural biopolymer complexes, through their sophisticated structural designs, offer a promising solution to mitigate the aforementioned dilemma. The review provides an in-depth analysis of two core fabrication mechanisms—complex coacervation and layer-by-layer (LbL) electrostatic deposition. It highlights how these structures, via functional stratification, not only provide a physical barrier to protect polyphenols from environmental stressors in complex food matrices but also confer the ability for smart release in response to specific physiological signals in the digestive tract, such as pH shifts and enzymatic digestion. Finally, we assess the feasibility and challenges of translating this technology from the laboratory to industrial-scale production, emphasizing its unique advantages in developing "clean label" functional foods. Future perspectives on precise structural control, multifunctional co-delivery, and interactions with gut microbiota are also discussed.
Keywords: Protein-polysaccharide complexes, Polyphenols, Complex Coacervation, layer-by-layer, Controlled Release, bioavailability, clean label
Received: 27 Oct 2025; Accepted: 27 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Yan, Borui, Hua and Xinna. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Wang Xinna
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