Nutrimetabolomics: Development of a Bio-Identification Toolbox to Determine The Bioactive Compounds in Grape Juice

Abstract

Background: Grape juice and related products have previously been associated with many health benefits, such as protection against cardiovascular disease. Current consensus is that the polyphenols are the likely bioactive species in these products. Results: Extracts of commercially available grape juices exhibited biological antioxidant activities ranging from 19.30 to 3099.51 µM trolox equivalents, as determined by cell-based assay in which J774 macrophages were stimulated with lipopolysaccaride at a concentration of 100 µg/ml for 1 h. Partial least-squares regression was then used to determine covariance between the antioxidant activity and 400 MHz ¹H NMR spectral profiles using models with R²X and R²Y values of 0.64 and 0.95, respectively, using three latent variables: the Q²(cum) was 0.63. Hydroxycinnamic acids and their derivatives were identified as being the most positively correlated with the antioxidant activity. Conclusion: The work presented here describes a strategy for the bioinformatic linkage of plant metabolomic data with in vitro biological activity as an initial step towards determining structure–activity relationships.

Ethical conduct of research

The authors state that they have obtained appropriate institutional review board approval or have followed the principles outlined in the Declaration of Helsinki for all human or animal experimental investigations. In addition, for investigations involving human subjects, informed consent has been obtained from the participants involved.

Financial & competing interests disclosure

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the BBSRC and Unilever for the funding of this work in the form of a CASE studentship for Angela Savage. The authors would also like to thank Jonathan Byrne (School of Pharmacy, University of Nottingham) for the set up of the COSY NMR spectra and Silvia Miret-Catalan (Unilever) for her assistance and expertise with the assay set-up.