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Extraction and Analysis of Natural Products in Food—3rd Edition

A special issue of Molecules (ISSN 1420-3049). This special issue belongs to the section "Natural Products Chemistry".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 November 2025 | Viewed by 171

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Institute of Biophysics, National Research Council, Palermo, Italy
Interests: food science; natural polyphenols; antioxidant action; nutraceutical properties
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
Ministry of Agriculture, Food Sovereignty and Forests, CREA, Rome, Italy
Interests: bioactive compounds; polyphenols; vegetable extracts; food byproducts; nutraceutical activity; innovative extraction techniques
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleague,

In recent years, the extractive production of natural products in the food industry, especially from different food byproducts, has seen significant development, and there has also been great progress in the separation and purification techniques of natural products. Natural products include compositions inside plants, animals, insects, and marine organisms—mainly proteins, polypeptides, amino acids, a variety of enzymes, fat, oil, monosaccharide, vitamin, alkaloids, volatile oil, flavones, organic acids, terpenoids, antibiotics, and other natural chemical compositions. Therefore, natural products have become the source of active compounds (i.e., compounds with beneficial effects on human health, such as foodborne pathogen protection, etc.), and the extraction of natural products is particularly important in multidisciplinary studies.

The aim of this Special Issue is to collect recent advances in extraction (conventional, emerging, and innovative methodologies) and analysis of natural products, including their sources, properties, and methods that have been developed to improve the extraction of compounds focusing on applications, scale-up, and process commercialization.

Dr. Valeria Guarrasi
Dr. Amenta Margherita
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • natural products
  • extraction methodologies: green impacts and sustainability 
  • separation and purification techniques 
  • agri-food byproducts 
  • natural bioactive compounds 
  • food ingredients 
  • industrial application

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

19 pages, 895 KiB  
Article
A Phytochemical and Biological Characterization of Cynara cardunculus L. subsp. scolymus Cultivar “Carciofo di Procida”, a Traditional Italian Agri-Food Product (PAT) of the Campania Region
by Giuseppina Tommonaro, Giulia De Simone, Carmine Iodice, Marco Allarà and Adele Cutignano
Molecules 2025, 30(15), 3285; https://doi.org/10.3390/molecules30153285 - 5 Aug 2025
Abstract
The artichoke (Cynara cardunculus L. subsp. scolymus) is an endemic perennial plant of the Mediterranean area commonly consumed as food. It is known since ancient times for its beneficial properties for human health, among which its antioxidant activity due to polyphenolics [...] Read more.
The artichoke (Cynara cardunculus L. subsp. scolymus) is an endemic perennial plant of the Mediterranean area commonly consumed as food. It is known since ancient times for its beneficial properties for human health, among which its antioxidant activity due to polyphenolics stands out. In the frame of our ongoing studies aiming to highlight the biodiversity and the chemodiversity of natural resources, we investigated the phenolic and saponin content of the cultivar “Carciofo di Procida” collected at Procida, an island of the Gulf of Naples (Italy). Along with the edible part of the immature flower, we included in our analyses the stem and the external bracts, generally discarded for food consuming or industrial preparations. The LCMS quali-quantitative profiling of polyphenols (including anthocyanins) and cynarasaponins of this cultivar is reported for the first time. In addition to antioxidant properties, we observed a significant cytotoxic activity due to extracts from external bracts against human neuroblastoma SH-SY5Y cell lines with 43% of cell viability, after 24 h from the treatment (50 μg/mL), and less potent but appreciable effects also against human colorectal adenocarcinoma CaCo-2 cells. This suggests that the different metabolite composition may be responsible for the bioactivity of extracts obtained from specific parts of artichoke and foresees a possible exploitation of the discarded material as a source of beneficial compounds. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Extraction and Analysis of Natural Products in Food—3rd Edition)
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