Mediterranean wild plants as useful sources of potential natural food additives

There is a growing interest in the search of new natural products to be used as additives, instead of synthetic compounds, in preserving flavour, improving taste and appearance and preventing food and drinks from mouldy or stale. Mediterranean area is known to be an hot spot of a very high plant species biodiversity and, for its strong environmental conditions (e.g. drought stress), a potential source of wide phytochemical diversity. In this context and in order to discover new bioactive compounds, we carried out phytochemical analysis of Mediterranean wild plants species. Crude extracts and pure metabolites have been tested by different antioxidant and radical scavenging bioassays as well as antiproliferative tests on stabilized cell lines. In order to propose the use of such plant complexes in industrially processed foods, an overall toxicity approach has been adopted considering aquatic toxicity testing, mutagenesis, genotoxicity and endocrine disrupting activity. In the aim to identify the main metabolites responsible for the observed bioactivity, the metabolic profiling of crude extract have been performed by 1D and 2D NMR experiments. © 2012 American Chemical Society.