Abstract
Plants constitute important sources of many vital components for humankind. In this paper, the importance of many vegetable components, in particular lipids and proteins from various plant origins, e.g., cereals and algae, were highlighted as well as their potential applications, especially in nutraceuticals and food industries. Oat (Avena sativa) is a unique cereal as source of many enzymes in particular glycoside hydrolases and lipolytic enzymes that could serve in food industries such as in bakery. Oats contain also an important lipid fraction including polyunsaturated fatty acids and tocopherol (vitamin E) as potential antioxydant agents for nutraceuticals. Besides, aquatic plants, mainly macroalgae and microalgae, for aquaculture and nutrition, could pave the way for the food of the future. More research on botany is needed to better understand the roles of lipids and proteins from different plants and to uncover more of their benefits in human life.
1 Introduction
Plants form the basis for life and the branch of biology that deals with the study of plants is “botany”. The term “botany” could also be replaced by plant biology, plant sciences, or phytology. Although the importance of botany in human life includes in particular its interest in agriculture, food, and nutrition, there is a decline in botany research in the 21 st century. Botany, the scientific study of plants as a comprehensive multilevel discipline, is nowadays in jeopardy as it is reflected in, for instance, a recent decline in the numbers of botany students, botanical university departments, plant collections, and botany courses, which highlight the current erosion of this scientific discipline [1]. However, botany is essential in many biological projects, in particular, the specificity of each plant’s scientific name in the fields of agri-food, nutrition, and nutraceuticals. The investigation of the whole plant components is interesting for many usages. Plant lipids and proteins, as two vital plant components, for instance, can be used in many applications, particularly to proliferate the agri-food industry. Special attention in this paper is addressed mainly to outlining the already published author’s works in terms of functional foods, dietary supplements, nutraceuticals, and related words from mainly oats and algae.
Functional foods refer to foods that enhance adequate nutritional effects on one or more target functions in the body, which can be relevant to either a reduction of disease risk or an improved state of health and wellbeing [2].
Dietary supplements, herbal products, natural product-driven nutrients, and processed foods, such as soups, beverages, and cereals are termed as nutraceuticals; and food nutraceuticals are dietary compounds that have health benefits [3].
Nutraceutical is a hybrid word that combines the two terms “nutrition/nutrient” and “pharmaceutical” [4, 5]. Nutraceuticals are foods or elements of foods obtained from various natural origins (microorganisms, plants, or animals) with significant health benefits which can be employed to prevent or cure diseases [3, 6, 7]. They are a leading trend in the healthcare medicines in the market and are connected to food and pharmaceutical industries and thus the nutraceutical industry contains food bioactive compounds particularly phytochemicals as active principles in pharmaceutical forms (powders, capsules, pills, vials, etc.) [4].
Nutraceuticals include any natural compounds with health and therapeutic benefits such as natural antioxidants, vitamins, flavonoids, carotenoids, polyphenols, dietary fibers, peptides, polyunsaturated fatty acids, prebiotics and probiotics [3, 5, 8]. Furthermore, the market for nutraceuticals is a fairly new section of food industry that is growing rapidly [9].
The author’s publications are focused on cultivated oat or common oat with the genus Avena and species sativa (Avena sativa L.), which is an important grain cereal and forage crop [10].
Oat was used as a plant material to verify the possibility of irrigation with treated wastewater [11]. Besides, oats could be cultivated in agricultural areas with high salt concentrations [12]. In this paper, with the interest on lipids and proteins from oats, there is also an emphasis on the importance of oleaginous algae for potential agri-food applications [13]. As such, the present paper is intended to use lipids and proteins as two examples of high-value compounds from different botanical identified plants, e.g., oats, algae, and other plants, in further nutraceutical and agri-food industries. More botanically identification of unknown plants, either aquatic or non-aquatic plants, may gain momentum in the food of the future.
2 Plant lipids and proteins in food sciences
Plant lipids particularly plant fats and oils can be either major components or minor additives of the food product depending on the amount used. The major sources of plants fats and oils included sunflower oil, flaxseed oil, and canola oil. And oleaginous algae are the major sources of plant-based omega-3 fatty acids DHA (docosahexaenoic acid (DHA, 22:6n − 3)) and EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA, C20:5n-3)) [14].
Regarding the importance of lipids in food and nutrition, oxidation of lipids is the major chemical reaction that deteriorates the quality and affects the activity of this class of nutrients. Therefore, any treatments using high temperature, long exposure to light, oxygen and humidity should be avoided to maintain the nutritional value of plant lipids, fats and oils. To this end, the conditions for quality conservation of these plant components including the packaging and preservation methods should be taken into consideration.
Several plants are rich in both proteins and lipids and are plant-based foods such as cereals, pseudocereals; legumes, nuts and seeds. Cereals like wheat, maize, and rice cover almost 50% of the global food protein for the human consumption. And pseudocereal like quinoa is a complete proteins source and also contains lipids. Legumes like soybeans and lentils are excellent sources of proteins and also contain healthy fats. Nuts and seeds, such as tiger nuts, sesame seeds, and hemp seeds, are known for their proteins content and healthy lipids.
For more information about plant proteins in food science, please refer to [15,16,17,18].
3 Lipids and oils from oat and other different species of plants
3.1 Importance of plant lipids as sources of some nutrients
Oat (Avena sativa) was used as a plant material in which oil was extracted from seeds in the report of [19]. The studied oat was a medium oil cultivar (roughly 5% oil extracted from seeds) and that oil was rich in essential polyunsaturated fatty acids and tocopherols (vitamin E).
Due to the nutritional composition, oat oil was nutraceutical in preventing mouse reprotoxicity damage by agricultural pesticides (e.g., Deltamethrin) as reported by [19]. Oat seed lipid extract may be of great interest as a nutraceutical in fertility and highly competitive for other nutritional purposes [10].
Moreover, other vegetable and plant fixed oils such as the oil from pumpkin seeds (Cucurbita pepo L.) and its characterization and implication on wound healing in rats could be explored in future investigations. In fact, pumpkin seed oil is rich in many bioactive constituents such as sterols, polyunsaturated fatty acids, and tocopherols. These constituents make pumpkin oil a promising drug for nutritional and medicinal purposes.
It is important to note that plant lipid/oil can contain cholesterol. In fact, sterols are nutrient compounds. Generally, zoosterols particularly cholesterols are derived from animals and phytosterols are derived from algae and plants. However, small quantities of cholesterols can be derived from plants [20, 21]. And cholesterol is present in red algae and microalgae; cholesterol is found in one-third of microalgae [21, 22].
In addition, other selected publications reported the characterization of various essential oils and their potential applications, such as the characterization of essential oils from Artemisia phaeolepis [23], Citrus aurantium L. flowers [24], and lemon (Citrus limon) [25]. Essential oil from different species of plant (e.g., Ceratonia siliqua and Citrus limon) has a preservative effect against pathogenic bacteria, in particular Listeria monocytogenes [26], when inoculated in minced beef meat [25, 27].
3.2 Lipid fractions of other plant species
Seeds of the following plants (Barley, Brachypodium, Maize, Beans (Vigna spp.), Arabidopsis, Wheat, and Peanut) were reported in the publication of [28], which were used as plant materials to compare their lipid fractions in particular neutral lipid e.g., triacylglycerol and polar lipids e.g., phospholipids with that of oat seeds (Avena sativa L.). The Lipid fraction of these seeds was extracted with isopropanol-chloroform/37% (v/v) HCl-0.9%NaCl (10:10:10 v/v/v). In this report of [28], HPTLC (High-Performance Thin Layer Chromatography) was used as an outstanding analytical technique with good separation to identify neutral and polar lipids from these plant seeds. Triacylglycerols are the main component of all extracted seed lipid fractions, which suggests a good quality of such lipid fractions to be used in many food and nutritional applications. Furthermore, oat seed lipid fraction contains polar lipids such as phospholipids, which reinforce its utilization in food applications.
On the other hand, lipids from oleaginous algae (macroalgae and microalgae) are of great nutritional interest due to the polyunsaturated fatty acids composition, which could be used in aquaculture and other applications [29, 30].
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Ben Halima, N. Special attention to the relevance of lipids and proteins from oats and algae for the future of food and nutraceuticals. Discov Food 5, 318 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44187-025-00571-8
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