Prenylated flavonoids, promising nutraceuticals with impressive biological activities

•Prenylated flavonoids are novel nutraceuticals with impressive health benefits.•The bioactivities of prenylated flavonoids are reviewed.•The chemical and biological synthesis of prenylated flavonoids are reviewed.•The structural characteristics of prenylated flavonoids are reviewed.

Prenylated flavonoids have attracted much attention as a novel type of nutraceuticals in late years. The main structural characteristics and biological activities of prenylated flavonoids are reviewed in this paper. Usually prenylated flavonoids have a low abundance in nature and are complicated to be chemically synthesized, which limits the applications in dietary supplements and medicines. Biotransformation is a promising alternative to solve this problem due to the advantages of high specificity, easy manipulation and good productivity. The key to this technique is to find an effective flavonoid prenyltransferase. Detailed information regarding biotransformation and flavonoid prenyltransferase is reviewed in this paper.