Novel approaches to improve the production and delivery of Plant Health-Promoting Compounds.

With the rapid advances in biomedical research, there has been a growing interest in unravelling the extraordinary properties of some commonly used natural products. Natural compounds can be extracted for commercial use from different natural sources. Natural secondary metabolites generally contain a mixture of different molecules. For use as "nutraceutical", it may be important to control the composition of metabolite mixtures, as different molecules exhibit different bioactive properties. Furthermore, industry requires compounds that can have stable activity (pigmentation, antioxidant activity) in a range of food and pharmaceutical systems. A viable cell culture system for production of natural compounds has the potential advantage of facilitating selective production of stable bioactive molecules and circumventing problems of uncertain or seasonal supply. The improvement of the natural compounds uptake is another important challenge. The utilization of micro/nano-capsules offers several advantages respect to the delivery of free compounds because it can increase the uptake of the selected compounds through the gastrointestinal barrier protecting them from adverse environmental parameters. The use of micro/nano-capsules to store and deliver a wide variety of natural compounds is of great interest due to their potential applications in areas such as medicine, catalysis, cosmetics as well as food-biotechnology. Resveratrol, a plant phenolic compound, is found in grapes and red wine but is not widely distributed in other common food sources. Aims of the present study are the production of health promoting polyphenols from V. vinifera cell cultures, and the improvement of their delivery through encapsulation into nano/micro-carriers with tailored structure according to polyphenol chemical features.