Innovative Processing for Bioactive and Antioxidant Recovery in Foods
A special issue of Antioxidants (ISSN 2076-3921). This special issue belongs to the section "Extraction and Industrial Applications of Antioxidants".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 November 2026 | Viewed by 9
Special Issue Editor
Interests: bioactive compounds; food engineering; bioavailability; waste valorization; encapsulation
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
This Special Issue on “Innovative Processing for Bioactive and Antioxidant Recovery in Foods” examines advanced extraction and delivery strategies designed to improve the recovery of health-promoting compounds from food materials, with a strong focus on sustainability, process efficiency, and preservation of bioactivity.
Its main contributions include emphasizing green technologies as promising alternatives to conventional extraction methods. Among these, supercritical fluid extraction (SFE) with CO2 is particularly notable because its low critical temperature enables the selective recovery of compounds such as lycopene, while also supporting “organic” labeling. However, its industrial adoption is limited by the high cost of the required equipment. Other techniques, including ultrasound-assisted extraction (UAE), microwave-assisted extraction (MAE), enzymatic-assisted extraction (EAE), high-pressure processing, and pulsed electric field (PEF), can enhance extraction yields through optimization of variables such as temperature, solvent-to-solid ratio, and extraction time, often using response surface methodology.
For these technologies to become standard at the industrial level, further work is needed to critically evaluate their true environmental impact, including factors such as energy demand and scalability. In addition, greater attention should be given to integrating extraction with delivery systems for the recovered bioactives. In particular, natural deep eutectic solvents (NADES) show strong potential not only as extraction media but also as functional systems for stabilizing and delivering bioactive compounds. Likewise, approaches that combine extraction with in situ encapsulation or nanoparticle formation could offer a more integrated and forward-looking framework, rather than addressing extraction and delivery as separate fields.
Dr. Patroklos Vareltzis
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Antioxidants is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- bioactive compounds
- antioxidant recovery
- innovative extraction techniques
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