Seaweeds as Source of Bioactive Pigments with Neuroprotective and/or Anti-Neurodegenerative Activities: Astaxanthin and Fucoxanthin.

The marine kingdom is an important source of a huge variety of scaffolds inspiring the design of new drugs. The complex molecules found in the oceans present a great challenge to organic and medicinal chemists. However, the wide variety of biological activities they can display is worth the effort. In this article, we present an overview of different seaweeds as potential sources of bioactive pigments with activity against neurodegenerative diseases, especially due to their neuroprotective effects. Along with a broad introduction to seaweed as a source of bioactive pigments, this review is especially focused on astaxanthin and fucoxanthin as potential neuroprotective and/or anti-neurodegenerative agents. PubMed and SciFinder were used as the main sources to search and select the most relevant scientific articles within the field.

Cytogenotoxicity assessment of 3-(3,4-dihydroxyphenyl)-7,8-dihydroxycoumarin on HepG2/C3A cells and leukocytes.

3-(3,4-Dihydroxyphenyl)-7,8-dihydroxycoumarin is a newly synthesized coumarin derivative with a potent antioxidant effect. The aim of the present study is to investigate the safety of this compound, determining the in vitro cytotoxic and genotoxic in human peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) and in HepG2/C3A cells. Cell viability has been investigated by the trypan blue staining test and MTT assay and the genotoxicity by the comet assay and micronucleus test, using concentrations between 0.01 and 10 µg/ml. The compound proved to be noncytotoxic in both cell lines, at all tested concentrations, protecting the cells from the DNA damage. In addition, this molecule does not show clastogenic/aneugenic effects when performing the micronucleus test with cytokinesis blockade. Based on the obtained data, and the conditions of the experiments, we can conclude that the 3-(3,4-dihydroxyphenyl)-7,8-dihydroxycoumarin is a safe molecule up to a concentration of 10 µg/ml, which encourages further studies aiming to explore its potential as a drug candidate.

Essential oils inhibiting Alternaria alternata and Colletotrichum gloeosporioides: a review.

Essential oils (EOs) have been investigated for their effectiveness against fungal fruit pathogens. The present review article summarises the EOs that inhibit Alternaria alternata and Colletotrichum gloeosporioides in the pre- and post-harvest stages of fruits. Thirty-nine scientific papers focusing on the extraction conditions and the antifungal activity of EOs were selected. The retrieved studies came mainly from China and Brazil. Hydrodistillation has been identified as the most used extractive method. The yields and chemical profiles were variable among the species. The in vitro studies were larger than the in vivo studies. The application of EOs reduced the incidence of fungal diseases in tomatoes (Lycopersicon esculentum), papaya (Carica papaya) and mango (Mangifera indica). EOs resulted as a potential ecological alternative for treating fungal diseases in fruits requiring further investigation.

Anaerobic digestate management, environmental impacts, and techno-economic challenges.

Digestate is a nutrient-rich by-product from organic waste anaerobic digestion but can contribute to nutrient pollution without comprehensive management strategies. Some nutrient pollution impacts include harmful algal blooms, hypoxia, and eutrophication. This contribution explores current productive uses of digestate by analyzing its feedstocks, processing technologies, economics, product quality, impurities, incentive policies, and regulations. The analyzed studies found that feedstock, processing technology, and process operating conditions highly influence the digestate product characteristics. Also, incentive policies and regulations for managing organic waste by anaerobic digestion and producing digestate as a valuable product promote economic benefits. However, there are not many governmental and industry-led quality assurance certification systems for supporting commercializing digestate products. The sustainable and safe use of digestate in different applications needs further development of technologies and processes. Also, incentives for digestate use, quality regulation, and social awareness are essential to promote digestate product commercialization as part of the organic waste circular economy paradigm. Therefore, future studies about circular business models and standardized international regulations for digestate products are needed.

Artificial Intelligence Applied to Flavonoid Data in Food Matrices.

Increasing interest in constituents and dietary supplements has created the need for more efficient use of this information in nutrition-related fields. The present work aims to obtain optimal models to predict the total antioxidant properties of food matrices, using available information on the amount and class of flavonoids present in vegetables. A new dataset using databases that collect the flavonoid content of selected foods has been created. Structural information was obtained using a structural-topological approach called TOPological Sub-Structural Molecular (TOPSMODE). Different artificial intelligence algorithms were applied, including Machine Learning (ML) methods. The study allowed us to demonstrate the effectiveness of the models using structural-topological characteristics of dietary flavonoids. The proposed models can be considered, without overfitting, effective in predicting new values of Oxygen Radical Absorption capacity (ORAC), except in the Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) algorithm. The best optimal model was obtained by the Random Forest (RF) algorithm. The in silico methodology we developed allows us to confirm the effectiveness of the obtained models, by introducing the new structural-topological attributes, as well as selecting those that most influence the class variable.