Agriculture and food processing industry generate a huge amount of waste streams that are often not properly taken care of, both in environmental and economic terms. Therefore, in the last years there has been great social and environmental interest for their efficient reuse. Since these residues are often rich in bioactive compounds potentially suitable from a variety of applications (nutraceuticals, drugs for the prevention or treatment of pathologies, cosmetic ingredients, active agents for smart packaging, etc.), the identification and recovery of such compounds would turn waste into a valuable product, thus improving the ecosustainability of cultivations by reducing waste disposal.
The objective of this project is the development of a new systematic analytical approach for the recovery, identification and isolation of bioactive peptides from plant waste and for the characterization of their biological activity. To achieve this result, research and development activities will be performed in three different areas. New extraction and purification protocols; highly predictive screening bioassays and comprehensive proteomic approaches to investigate the proteome of the selected plant models and to identify the molecules responsible for biological activity.
The approach developed in this project for the identification and isolation of bioactive peptides suitable for a variety of potential applications (nutraceuticals, drugs, cosmetic ingredients, active agents for smart packaging, ingredients useful to agriculture practice for control of pathogens or bio-stimulants, etc.) will be easily transferrable to any other cultivation or vegetal waste, thus allowing for waste valorization or even for finding new uses of cultivations as sources of high added value bioactive products. The evaluation of the biological properties and the complete peptidic characterization of waste will determine firstly, which is the best waste handling for by-products for the Health-Food industry, and secondly, how the residuals can be treated for obtaining by-products. Besides the investigation of vegetal materials, the set of bioassays for the evaluation of biological activities and of preventive and/or therapeutic effect against different pathologies could also be used for pharmaceutical applications, for example they can be implemented in the early stages of drug discovery and development process.
The novel extraction technologies, able of reducing solvent consumption and of increasing the overall eco-sustainability of the process, will be adaptable to automated procedures and may represent an effective alternative for the recovery of bioactive molecules from plant waste in a cascading approach.
Furthermore, use of immobilized proteases for improving extraction efficiency of residues particularly rich in proteins could be of interest for scaling-up extraction processes obtaining a stable and reproducible production of protein hydrolysates.