Revalorization of food by-products as sources of bioactive compounds

Abstract

The present doctoral dissertation comprises the extraction, identification and quantification of phenolic compounds from olive leaves, cereals and pseudocereals fractions and/or by-products to revalorize these matrices as possible bioactive compounds sources to be used as bioactive ingredients against certain diseases. It is divided into two main parts; the first one is the INTRODUCTION, which reports a brief description of the classification of phenolic compounds and an overview of the phenolic composition of olive leaves, cereals and pseudocereals grains (brewer’s spent grains, buckwheat and wheat), their beneficial properties, the sample pretreatment, the subsequent treatment and green technologies used for the extraction and the characterization by different analytical approaches. Firstly, phenolic compounds are described and classified according to their chemical structure. After that, the fractionation technologies used in cereal and pseudocereal grains in order to enrich cereal flour fractions are included. In addition, the four green extraction technologies (e.g. microwave assisted extraction, pressurized liquid extraction, ultrasound assisted extraction and pulsed electric field) used for the phenolic recovery in this thesis are reported.,. Finally, chromatographic analytical techniques used for separation, such as high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and gas chromatography (GC), and the coupling to detection systems like UV-Vis and mass spectrometry (MS) for the identification and quantification of phenolic compounds are described.