Title: In vitro antioxidant activity and bioactive components of by-product extracts (lemon and red pepper)

Biography:

She has completed his PhD at the age of 28 years from Extremadura University and Postdoctoral Studies from School of Food Biosciences, The University of Reading. She is a Senior Professor at Agricultural Engineering School. She has published more than 25 papers in reputed journals.               
 

Abstract

The antioxidant activity of extracts from several agro-industrial by-products has been long acknowledged and a great number of extracts have been evaluated in vitro and in vivo (Sagar et al., 2018). By-products from lemon and red pepper industry are produced in a great amount, and most of them are underused. The value of these by-products could be increased as used as potential antioxidant agents in foods (M’hiria et al., 2018 and Sandoval-Castro, 2017). In this work we obtained extracts from lemon and red pepper, and studied their composition and in vitro antioxidant potential in comparison to rosemary extract, a very well known natural antioxidant. The antioxidant activity of the extracts was based on the scavenging activity of the 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl free radical (DPPH) (expressed as IC50), the Fe2+-chelating ability (expressed as IC50) and the reducing power (Broncano et al., 2011). Total phenolic content (TPC) was measured using the Folin-Ciocalteu procedure (Singleton and Rossi, 1965). Total vitamin C content was assessed by RP-HPLC (Rizzolo et al., 2002). As it was assumed, rosemary extracts showed the highest scavenging, chelating and reducing activity (P<0.001). Lemon extracts also presented an important antioxidant potential, this potential being higher than the control (VIT C) in the DPPH assay (P<0.001). The highest content of vitamin C in lemon extracts (P<0.001) could be responsible of this great scavenging activity. Related to TPC, values of this parameter were significantly higher in rosemary extracts than in lemon or red pepper extracts.