Abstract
Benefits to health from a high consumption of fruits and vegetables are well established and have been attributed to bioactive secondary metabolites present in edible plants. However, the effects of specific health-related phytochemicals within a complex food matrix are difficult to assess. In an attempt to address this problem, we have used elicitation to improve the nutraceutical content of seedlings of Brassica oleracea grown under controlled conditions. Analysis, by LC-MS, of the glucosinolate, isothiocyanate and phenolic compound content of juices obtained from sprouts indicated that elicitation induces an enrichment of several phenolics, particularly of the anthocyanin fraction. To test the biological activity of basal and enriched juices we took advantage of a recently developed in vitro model of inflamed human intestinal epithelium. Both sprouts’ juices protected intestinal barrier integrity in Caco-2 cells exposed to tumor necrosis factor α under marginal zinc deprivation, with the enriched juice showing higher protection. Multivariate regression analysis indicated that the extent of rescue from stress-induced epithelial dysfunction correlated with the composition in bioactive molecules of the juices and, in particular, with a group of phenolic compounds, including several anthocyanins, quercetin-3-Glc, cryptochlorogenic, neochlorogenic and cinnamic acids.
Highlights
Epidemiological data indicate that frequent fruit and vegetable consumption is associated with a reduction in morbidity and mortality from cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes mellitus and several cancers [1,2,3,4], and this effect has been attributed to their high content in vitamins, minerals, polyphenols and other bioactive molecules
Multivariate regression analysis indicated that the extent of rescue from stress-induced epithelial dysfunction correlated with the composition in bioactive molecules of the juices and, in particular, with a group of phenolic compounds, including several anthocyanins, quercetin-3-Glc, cryptochlorogenic, neochlorogenic and cinnamic acids
We found that treatment with sucrose that had been previously reported to elicit the accumulation of glucosinolate and phenolic compounds and to trigger the synthesis of anthocyanins in broccoli sprouts [43,44,45] provides the most significant overall effect on phytochemical composition of broccoli sprouts [13]
Summary
Epidemiological data indicate that frequent fruit and vegetable consumption is associated with a reduction in morbidity and mortality from cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes mellitus and several cancers [1,2,3,4], and this effect has been attributed to their high content in vitamins, minerals, polyphenols and other bioactive molecules. Plants have evolved a high metabolic plasticity as a sophisticated adaptive defensive response mechanism to grow and survive under biotic and abiotic stresses [10,11]. While this flexibility contributes to the compositional variability that challenges the scientific assessment of the benefits of plant foods, the environmental response of plants can be exploited to enhance the content of specific health-related molecules, or classes of molecules, within the food matrix. Most of the bioactives that have been shown to exert a protective role in animals are secondary metabolites, mainly phenolics, that plants synthetize to protect themselves from adverse environmental conditions. By systematic evaluation of many different elicitors, we have identified sucrose as the elicitor that provides the most significant overall effect on phytochemical composition of young broccoli seedlings [13]
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