Iron deficiency is the most encountered worldwide nutritional disease, affecting women, babies, and children. When dietary iron absorption is insufficient to fulfill physiological demands, nutritional iron insufficiency arises. Legumes are a low-cost source of protein that are also beneficial for human health. From a nutritional standpoint, the iron-chelating ability of legume proteins is of importance since they may have high iron mineral stability against in vitro digestion because they are bound to proteins. Legume proteins extracts are commonly utilized as functional components; however, their functionality must be proved in a cell culture system by assessing their physiological activity. Furthermore, during iron deprivation disturbances in copper homeostasis have been observed repeatedly in the literature. And this pointed out that copper might have a compensatory effect on anemia caused by iron deficiency dependant cellular signaling mechanisms. Within this context, the main objectives of this Ph.D. thesis were (i) to develop highly bioavailable, edible protein-iron complex hydrolysates from legumes that can be used as an additive in food products and investigate their functional properties against iron deficiency anemia. Also, (ii) investigating the compensatory effects of copper mineral on iron deficiency anemia and, (iii) its main application for functional food development were other driving forces for the experiments. It was revealed that protein (peptide)-iron complexes derived from lentil (10:1 ratio) and soybean (20:1 and 40:1 ratios) significantly influenced the iron-dependent gene regulation in enterocyte cells compared to the anemic group. Moreover, intracellular gene regulation was mainly affected by copper treatment in the basolateral side of enterocyte cells during IDA, indicating that blood copper level might have the ability to control the enterocyte iron metabolism at molecular and genetic levels during iron deficiency anemia.