Nutraceuticals: chemical characterization and delivery systems

Food valorisation nowadays is an important topic related to the everyday life, like nutrition or reduction of food waste. During this doctoral project this topic was declined in three main aspects: food fortification, design of delivery systems for sustainable agriculture and food quality and traceability. Moreover, the circular economy was a key aspect considered in the project. The agriculture by-products were chemical characterised to use them as food fortificants, sources of bioactive molecules for prevention of diseases, or for the formulation of green delivery systems for agriculture soil treatments. Flour derivatives are foods suitable for the fortification, due to the ease of addition of different ingredients in whole form (i.e., oilseeds) or in powder (i.e., grounded olive leaves). This topic was explored, in this study, analysing prototypes of flour derivatives (Piadina Romagnola and sliced bread) enriched with different types of fortificants. The analyses were focused on the evaluation of antioxidant activity profile on extracts comparing the fortified and the commercial products. In addition, for some selected samples of Piadina Romagnola, was performed a simulation of gastrointestinal tract for the evaluation of antioxidant activity with spectrophotometric assay and in vitro on CaCo2-cell line. The results shown an increase in antioxidant activity of the fortified products in the respect to the ones not fortified, and this behaviour was also observed after the simulation of gastrointestinal tract. The results obtained on the treaded cells confirms the reduction of ROS and the decrease of inflammatory activity induced by TNF-α and IL-1β. These results confirm the enhancement of the products after the fortification and the possibility to propose new foods whit beneficial effects helping in prevention of diseases. The preliminary analysis conducted on the chemical characterisation Medicago sativa and by- products of tomato industry, are promising for the application of these products as alternative food fortificants due to their chemical composition. The extracts of Medicago sativa were mainly characterised by flavonoids molecules well known as antioxidants compounds. The characterisation of tomato seeds oil underlines its possible use for additive in food industry. The study about the design of delivery systems for agriculture application was underline a suitability of hydrogels for their use for soil treatments, for instance the reduction of fungal and bacterial growth and moreover these systems allow the controlled release of bioactive molecules. Also was observed a high encapsulation efficiency of compounds. These results are promising for their use as green solution for agriculture soil treatments due to the biocompatibility of polymer used for the synthesis and the use of extracts derived from agriculture by-products. The agriculture products valorisation is also related to the geographical provenance, and this could be assess studying the chemical profile of the products. In particular, in the last year of the doctoral project, was starting the analysis of olive oil and wine matrices to identify key compounds for geographical identification. The first results are related to the chemical characterisation of soils, fruits and leaves in order to design the best model that could be able to assess the origin of the products. This was done using different analytic techniques for chemical characterisation (i.e., ICP-MS, HPLC- HRMS, NMR) and interpretating data with a multivariate approach, studying the best classification model. The results obtained until now for the matrices soils, leaves and fruits were determined both important organic and inorganic compounds for the geographical identification, and the mathematical models are extending to the final products olive oil and wine.