Elsevier

Food and Chemical Toxicology

Volume 114, April 2018, Pages 190-203
Food and Chemical Toxicology

Review
Quercetin and iron metabolism: What we know and what we need to know

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fct.2018.02.022 Get rights and content

Highlights

  • ā€¢

    Quercetin plays versatile roles in iron absorption, hepcidin regulation and cellular iron uptake and release.

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    The recent advances and molecular mechanisms behind the quercetin-iron complex's multiple biological actions are discussed.

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    Quercetin alleviates iron overload induced by various pathologies as a natural iron chelator.

  • ā€¢

    Quercetin primary sources, daily intake and biochemistry.

Abstarct

Iron is a life-supporting micronutrient that is required in the human diet, and is essential for maintaining physiological homeostasis. Properly harnessing a redox-active metal such as iron is a great challenge for cells and organisms because an excess of highly reactive iron catalyzes the formation of reactive oxygen species and can lead to cell and tissue damage. Quercetin is a typical flavonoid that is commonly found in fruits and vegetables and has versatile biological effects. From a classical viewpoint, owing to its unique chemical characteristics, quercetin has long been associated with iron metabolism only in the context of its iron-chelating and ROS-scavenging activities. However, within the field of human iron biology, expanding concepts of the roles of quercetin are flourishing, and great strides are being made in understanding the interactions between quercetin and iron. This progress highlights the varied roles of quercetin in iron metabolism, which involve much more than iron chelation alone. A review of these studies provides an ideal context to summarize recent progress and discuss compelling evidence for therapeutic opportunities that could arise from a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms.

Section snippets

Quercetin primary sources and daily intake

Quercetin's name comes from the Latin quercetum, meaning oak forest, or Quercus (oak), and quercetin is the dietary flavonoid that has attracted the most attention from the scientific community. Because of its widespread dietary sources, quercetin accounts for approximately 75% of our total flavonol intake (Sampson et al., 2002). Quercetin provides colors to common fruits and vegetables because of its abundant distribution in rinds and barks. Of the vegetables, onions, the richest source of

Quercetin biochemistry

In flavonoids, different substitution patterns in the common diphenylpropane (C6-C3-C6) skeleton are responsible for their classifications and characterized biochemical activities (Cook and Samman, 1996) (Fig. 1A). More specifically, quercetin is a polyphenol that belongs to the flavonol subgroup of flavonoids. It is characterized by a phenyl benzo(c) pyrone-derived structure with five hydroxyl groups on its flavone backbone structure at the 3, 3Ź¹, 4Ź¹, 5, and 7 carbons (Mendoza-Wilson and

Iron homeostasis: roles of quercetin

As the second-most abundant metal on Earth, iron is so important that approximately 4 billion years ago, the first tellurian living organisms originated from the iron-rich oceans (Pietrangelo, 2015). Iron is an essential life-supporting micronutrient in the human diet, and it plays an irreplaceable role in many fundamental metabolic processes. Long before the occurrence of photosynthesis, iron-sulfur clusters acted as the earliest catalytic cofactors on Earth. They were used by the ancient

Quercetin and iron-catalyzed ROS-Formation

Quercetin's iron-chelating property and direct scavenging action against ROS (reactive oxygen species) are believed to be the essence of its antioxidant activity. In fact, its direct ROS-scavenging activity is at least partly responsible for quercetin's protective effects in the majority of the studies described above, in which its primarily function is iron chelation (Chander et al., 2005, Eybl et al., 2008, Li et al., 2016a, Morel et al., 1993, Singh et al., 2004, Zhang et al., 2006, Zhang et

Quercetin-iron complex: a seeded player with multiple biological functions

Numerous articles have shown that as a unique class of flavonoid derivatives, flavonoid-metal complexes, often exhibit a superior and broader spectrum of biological activities than their corresponding parent flavonoid alone. These activities include antioxidant, antimicrobial, anticancer, anti-inflammatory and anti-diabetic capacities (Havsteen, 2002, Li et al., 2008, Prajapati et al., 2010). This spectrum is attributed to the specific spatial configuration generated in the complex of the metal

Other interactions between iron and quercetin

The formation of ROS is closely related to the redox state of iron. The Fe2+-initiated production of superoxide anions by the reduction of one electron of oxygen initiates the formation of hydrogen peroxide and a subsequent Fenton reaction. This reaction is responsible for the generation of hydroxyl radicals, the most ā€œnoxiousā€ oxidants among the ROS. With respect to quercetin, apart from its iron-chelating and ROS scavenging activities, the enhancement of the autooxidation of Fe2+, which thus

Conclusions and future perspectives

Among the essential dietary nutrients, iron is clearly worthy of special attention, because free iron is highly reactive. However, humans do not have effective excretory mechanisms to decrease excessive serum iron or to buffer the levels of the pro-oxidant iron forms in serum and cells. In this context, humans have developed intricately homeostatic regulation mechanisms to keep the iron concentrations within a narrow range to avoid excess or deficiency. Quercetin has long been extensively

Conflicts of interest

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81472979, 81172658, 81402673 and 81472979).

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