Abstract

The human health benefits of fruits and vegetables are ascribed to theirphytochemical content, such as carotenoids and polyphenolics. In the search forantioxidative chemicals from native fruits of the Puglia region of Italy, Prunus cerasusL., an acidic cherry widely used for culinary purposes, and Prunus mahaleb L., a treespecies commonly used as rootstock in cherry crop, were studied. The P. mahalebfruits have a high content of organic acids, fructose and vitamin C, but are notconsumed fresh because of a bitter and sour taste. In this work we obtained the 1HNMR spectra of the two species and from the comparison of these spectra, we foundthat P. mahaleb fruits have an higher concentration of phenolic compounds, such asflavonoids, and organic acids, in comparison to P. cerasus fruits. The same resultswere obtained when we focused on anthocyanins. In this study we identified thesignals of anthocyanin protons in 1H NMR spectra of a mixture of compounds inaqueous extracts of both P. cerasus and P. mahaleb fruits but the latter species showeda higher concentration and a larger number of these compounds. This metabolomicanalysis gave us the data to scientifically revalue traditionally-used plants like P.mahaleb and to identify the potential as source of biofunctional compounds to be usedin food and/or pharmaceutical industry. Moreover, in this study, NMR spectroscopycoupled with multivariate data analysis was applied to Prunus metabolomics in orderto investigate the botanical origins of Prunus cerasus and to identify the compoundsresponsible for differentiation of these two species of Prunus (cerasus and mahaleb)and of two cultivars of Prunus cerasus ('Montmorency' and 'Marasca di Zara').

Autore Pugliese

• Mule' Giuseppina , Gerardi Carmela , Blando Federica

Tutti gli autori

• Gerardi C.; Blando F.; Mulè G.; Maltese F.; Ali K.; Verpoorte R.

Titolo volume/Rivista

Acta horticulturae

Anno di pubblicazione

2012

ISSN

0567-7572

ISBN

Non Disponibile

Numero di citazioni Wos

Nessuna citazione

Ultimo Aggiornamento Citazioni

Non Disponibile

Numero di citazioni Scopus

Non Disponibile

Ultimo Aggiornamento Citazioni

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Settori ERC

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Codici ASJC

Non Disponibile