Maybe you know both glutamate and aspartate are the building blocks for proteins; maybe you also understand both glutamate and aspartate are the excitatory neurotransmitters. However, do you know any other functions of glutamate and aspartate? In fact, glutamate and aspartate are truly functional amino acids. Both glutamate and aspartate play important roles in nutrition, metabolism, and immunity, resulting in health-promotion under healthy or certain stress conditions.

Oxidative stress is one of the greatest challenges for human and animals health and can impose damage on proteins, lipids, and even DNA. Thus, it will become a demon if uncontrolled oxidative stress occurs.

Recently, a research team led by Prof. YIN Yulong, from Institute of Subtropical Agriculture, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISA) has demonstrated that dietary supplementation with glutamate and aspartate protects piglets from oxidative stress. Using the established oxidative stress model of piglets induced by hydrogen peroxide, they have shown that glutamate and aspartate rescue the growth-suppression with attenuated decrease in daily feed intake, average daily gain, and feed efficiency. Simultaneously, glutamate and aspartate alleviate oxidative stress evidenced by decease in serum hydrogen peroxide concentration and increase in serum anti-oxidative enzymes activities in piglets.

Generally, approximately 50% of total amino acids released from the digestion of feed are absorbed into enterocytes via intestinal amino acid transporters, and subsequently enter the portal vein for utilization by extrahepatic tissues. Expectedly, glutamate and aspartate restore the alterations of serum amino acids concentrations which are closely associated with the occurrence and development of some diseases, and attenuate the changed expression of intestinal AA transporters in piglet challenged with hydrogen peroxide.

Thus, this investigation has widen the knowledge that glutamate and aspartate can be used as nutritional supplements to protect human and animals from oxidative stress, suggesting that both glutamate and aspartate hold great promise in the nutrition and health of animals and human.

The research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China, and Changsha Science and Technology Key Program, The Chinese Academy of Science STS Project, and Texas A&M AgriLife Research.

The main findings of this study have published on Amino Acid. Details can be found at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00726-015-2065-3.