Abstract
A growing demand – above all in industrialised countries – for safer foods and cleaner production processes has been observed in recent times. This has led to a drive, by the agro-alimentary industries, for waste reduction and upgrading as a strategy to reduce costs and achieve new sources of income. In fact, waste may be a source of high-added value products potentially useful as beneficial food constituents, food flavours and antioxidants, cosmetics, chemopreventive agents, drugs or drug adjuvants. In this regard, we have recently examined some vegetable wastes available in the Mediterranean basin as bioresources of useful compounds and we report here a short account of our work as an example of integrated approach between the query of agro-food industry for waste upgrading and the search of some sectors of chemical industry for bioactive products obtainable from renewable resources. We employed two different strategies aimed to the exploitation of vegetable by-products: 1) Identification or isolation of bioactive natural products in vegetable waste as possible source of lead compounds or enriched fractions. 2) Chemical and enzymatic modification of lead compounds available from vegetable waste to obtain optimized analogues, food additives, drugs or cosmetics. The results here summarised are focused on: a) isolation of antiproliferative constituents from almond (Prunus dulcis) hulls and grape (Vitis vinifera) stems; b) chemical analysis of extracts / fractions with antioxidant properties obtained from grape pomace and grape stems; c) chemical / enzymatic modification of hydroxytyrosol (26) and trans-resveratrol (11), two bioactive polyphenols available from vegetable waste.
Highlights
At the moment the agro-industry is undergoing new pressures from the new demands of the market and society in general: there is a greater attention to the quality of life and sustainable development
The results here summarised are focused on: a) isolation of antiproliferative constituents from almond (Prunus dulcis) hulls and grape (Vitis vinifera) stems; b) chemical analysis of extracts / fractions with antioxidant properties obtained from grape pomace and grape stems; c) chemical / enzymatic modification of hydroxytyrosol (26) and trans-resveratrol (11), two bioactive polyphenols available from vegetable waste
The most active sample NM showed the highest content in anthocyanins including a free catechol moiety in their structure, a well-known requisite for antioxidant activity [23, 31, 32] More recently, we prepared a defatted ethanolic (EtOH) extract of NM grape pomace which was submitted to the radical scavenging activity test (DPPH), showing SC50 = 9.9 μg/mL, and to the Folin-Ciocalteu assay [33] for the determination of the total amount of polyphenols, expressed as Gallic Acid Equivalent (GAE = 397.7 mg/g extract)
Summary
At the moment the agro-industry is undergoing new pressures from the new demands of the market and society in general: there is a greater attention to the quality of life and sustainable development. One may see a growing demand – above all in more industrialised countries – for safer foods and beverages and at the same time for cleaner production processes This has led to a drive, by the industries of the agro-alimentary sector, for waste reduction and upgrading as a strategy to reduce costs and achieve new sources of income, with a positive impact on public opinion. The fate of vegetable waste has been, up to recent times, mainly addressed to discharge This is true in South Europe, an area rich in agro-industrial production, with special reference to some fruit crops, like citrus, grape, olive and almond. Our work is based on two different strategies aimed to the exploitation of vegetable by-products: 1) Identification and/or isolation of bioactive natural products in vegetable waste as possible source of lead compounds or enriched fractions. We wish report here a summary of our recent work as an example of integrated approach between the query for waste upgrading of agro-food
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