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Fruit Nutrition and Human Health

Date:2011-09-06

With the development of society and the changes in life style, tremendous changes have taken place in the spectrum of diseases experienced by humans in recent decades. Chronic non infectious diseases such as diabetes and cancer are becoming growing problems, threatening daily life. Therefore, prevention and control programs are urgently needed to inhibit the rising incidence of these chronicus and their complications, and they have become important issues for the health care system worldwide.

Natural bioactive compounds from fruits are increasingly being considered as sources of chemopreventive agents due to their safety and efficacy. Most of them are excellent natural antioxidants due to the presence of numerous hydroxyl groups, which enable these compounds to have more diverse biological activities. Therefore, fruit nutrition quality has become a new and important constituent of fruit quality biology. The research direction is mainly focused on the discovery of natural bioactive compounds by various analytical and preparative techniques such as macroporous resin chromatography, HSCCC, HPLC, LC-MS, NMR etc; the regulation of natural bioactive compounds during fruit development and ripening; evaluation of various bioactivities including antioxidant, anti-diabetes, anti-cancer, etc. Characterization of bioactive compounds and bioactivity in different fruit species and tissues are important for the discovery of novel natural health-promoting fruit as well as comprehensive utilization of natural fruit resources.

The research is supported by National Natural Science Foundation, the National Key Technology Research and Development Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, the Special Scientific Research Fund of Agricultural Public Welfare Profession of China, The Program for Key Innovative Research Team of Zhejiang Province. A series of papers were published in Food Chemistry, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, Journal of Functional Foods, Plant Foods for Human Nutrition, International Journal of Molecular Sciences, Journal of Separation Science, Journal of Medicinal Food, and Biomedical Chromatography.

The main research areas include:
(1) Characterization of bioactive compounds in fruit;
(2) Changes and regulation of bioactive compounds in ripening fruit;
(3) Evaluation of the bioactivities of fruit extract.



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