Abstract
Hops (Humulus lupulus L.) are used traditionally in the brewing industry to confer bitterness, aroma, and flavor to beer. However, in recent years, it has been reported that female inflorescences contain a huge variety of bioactive compounds. Due to the growing interest of the consumers by natural ingredients, intense research has been carried out in the last years to find new sources of functional molecules. This review collects the works about the bioactive potential of hops with applications in the food, pharmaceutical, or cosmetic industries. Moreover, an overview of the main extraction technologies to recover biomolecules from hops is shown. Bioactivities of hop extracts such as antibacterial, antifungal, cardioprotective, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anticarcinogenic, and antiviral are also summarized. It can be concluded that hops present a high potential of bioactive ingredients with high quality that can be used as preservative agents in fresh foods, extending their shelf life, and they can be incorporated in cosmetic formulation for skincare as well.
Highlights
The common hop plant (Humulus lupulus L.) is a hardy and dioecious vine whose aerial part is herbaceous and annual, while the rootstock is perennial, and it can create adventitious roots every year [1]
The authors reported that the extracts presented a high antioxidant activity, and this antioxidant potential was influenced by different factors and concluded that the most effective process was using undiluted methanol during one hour of ultrasound-assisted extraction
Both molecules act on the nuclear factor kappa B (NF-kB) that is involved in the expression of pro-inflammatory genes such as tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α), inducible nitric oxide synthase, kinases, cyclooxygenases 1 and 2 (COX-1 and COX-2), and an amount interleukins [12,64]
Summary
The common hop plant (Humulus lupulus L.) is a hardy and dioecious vine whose aerial part is herbaceous and annual, while the rootstock is perennial, and it can create adventitious roots every year [1]. The biological benefits of plants, traditionally used in folk and/or traditional medicine, have been explored by the scientific world [5,8] In this sense, besides their use in the brewing industry, traditionally hop cones have been applied with medical purposes for the control. Taking the above into account, and the current trend of searching natural compounds with novel biological properties, the wealth of the hop in bioactive compounds makes it an excellent source to extract biologically active molecules with multiple applications in the alimentary, pharmaceutical, and nutraceutical industries [12,15,17,18,19,20]. The applications of these compounds in different fields such as pharmaceutical, nutraceutical, and cosmetic are summarized
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