Antioxidant Components of Food and Medicine Homology and Exploring Their Applications

Dear Colleagues,

Food–medicine homologous resources provide both nutritional value and health-promoting properties, making them important sources of natural antioxidant compounds. Bioactive constituents such as polyphenols, polysaccharides, saponins, alkaloids, terpenoids, vitamins, and organic acids can exert antioxidant effects by scavenging free radicals, maintaining redox homeostasis, alleviating inflammatory responses, and modulating gut microbiota and related metabolic pathways. These properties support their potential applications in food preservation, functional foods, nutritional interventions, and strategies for reducing the risk of chronic diseases.

However, several key issues remain to be clarified, including the compositional diversity, structural characteristics, bioavailability, stability, mechanisms of action, and synergistic antioxidant effects of these components. The effective incorporation of natural antioxidants from food–medicine homologous resources into foods, nutraceuticals, health products, and delivery systems, as well as their integration into disease prevention strategies, also remains an important research focus.

This Special Issue seeks to highlight recent advances in antioxidant components from food–medicine homologous resources and to facilitate their translation from fundamental research into practical applications. We welcome original research articles, reviews, and case studies covering the discovery of bioactive components, green extraction and purification, evaluation of antioxidant activity, elucidation of mechanisms, development of delivery systems, product development, and health-promoting applications. We hope that this Special Issue will provide new scientific evidence for the valorization of food–medicine homologous resources and their applications in food and health.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Green extraction, purification, structural characterization, structure–activity relationship analysis, and the evaluation of antioxidant activity of bioactive components from food–medicine homologous resources;
• Precise profiling of bioactive components in complex matrices derived from food–medicine homologous resources using techniques such as HPLC, LC–MS, GC–MS, NMR, metabolomics, and molecular networking;
• Molecular mechanisms underlying the health benefits of bioactive compounds from food–medicine homologous resources, including the regulation of oxidative stress, inflammatory responses, cell signaling pathways, gut microbiota, and microbial metabolites;
• Multi-component, multi-target, and multi-pathway interactions, as well as synergistic antioxidant effects, in food–medicine homologous resources;
• Stabilization of natural antioxidant compounds, development of delivery systems, improvement of bioavailability, and nano-delivery strategies;
• Translational applications of antioxidant components from food–medicine homologous resources in food preservation, functional food development, and resource valorization.

Prof. Dr. Wen Qin
Guest Editor

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