Abstract
Pomegranate peel extract is rich of interesting bioactive chemicals, principally phenolic compounds, which have shown antimicrobial, anticancer, and antioxidative properties. The aim of this work was to improve extract' bioactivity through the adsorption on calcium carbonate nanocrystals. Nanocrystals revealed as efficient tools for extract adsorption reaching 50% of loading efficiency. Controlled release of the contained metabolites under acidic pH has been found, as it was confirmed by quantitative assay and qualitative study through NMR analysis. Specific functionality of inorganic nanocarriers could be also tuned by biopolymeric coating. The resulting coated nanoformulations showed a great antimicrobial activity against B. cinerea fungus preventing strawberries disease better than a commercial fungicide. Furthermore, nanoformulations demonstrated a good antiproliferative activity in neuroblastoma and breast cancer cells carrying out a higher cytotoxic effect respect to free extract, confirming a crucial role of nanocarriers. Finally, pomegranate peel extract showed a very high radical scavenging ability, equal to ascorbic acid. Antioxidant activity, measured also in intracellular environment, highlighted a protective action of extract-adsorbed nanocrystals twice than free extract, providing a possible application for new nutraceutical formulations.
Highlights
Punica granatum is one of the fruits that most attracted the interest of researchers for its high potential use in medicine and food industry [1,2,3]
Postharvest phase is very crucial for fresh fruits and vegetables, resulting in substantial economic losses up to 25%, due to various pathogens. e effective control still derives from agrochemicals use that negatively affects food, animals, environment, and human health. e presence of residues on food and drinking water cause toxicological side effects such as carcinogenicity and teratogenicity. e current challenge is to reduce the high persistence of pesticides as well as to fight pests’ emergence paving the way for alternative strategies such as new biopesticides [20]
(bidistilled water from a Milli-Q-System, Millipore, Bedford, UK) mixed with 20% of ethanol. e mixture was sonicated for 15 min and agitated overnight at 40°C. e ethanol was evaporated, and the extract obtained was centrifuged, and the supernatant filtered through the 0.45 μm PTFE filter. e obtained pomegranate peel hydroalcoholic extract was stored in a freezer at −20°C until further use
Summary
Punica granatum is one of the fruits that most attracted the interest of researchers for its high potential use in medicine and food industry [1,2,3]. Punica granatum peel extract showed high efficiency as natural pesticide to control phytopathogens of crops and postharvest fruits diseases preventing and treating bacteria, fungi, and parasites [26,27,28,29,30]. The great antimicrobial propriety of pomegranate peel extract regards different pathogens affecting human health, including foodborne pathogens, both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, Streptococcus mutans causes dental caries and fungi, as Candida species [12, 13, 36, 37]. Polymeric and solid lipid nanoparticles have been investigated for loading and controlled release of pomegranate extract or individual polyphenols (such as punicalagin and ellagic acid) improving the antiproliferative effect, obtaining nanochemoprevention of different cancers [52,53,54,55]. Our results demonstrated the great potential of PAE nanoformulation based on bioinorganic nanosystems in different biological applications, ranging from human health and crops protection
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