The proposed project develops high-quality research of natural products (NPs) and flavours (FLs) and tends to impact the biodiversity, traceability and authentication issues of targeted samples (major EU concerns), as well as to unlock the potential (useful activities of the samples/NPs).
While characteristic NPs (secondary metabolites) already possess flavours, other flavour compounds can derive from precursors during processing, fermentation, dry-curing, heating, others (e.g. Maillard reactions, Strecker degradations, retro-aldol reactions, Amadori rearrangements, heterocyclizations, lipid oxidations and others).
Specific project goal is to determine reliable chemical fingerprints of targeted samples depending on biodiversity of natural sources in different regions.
Varieties of acetate, shikimate, mevalonate and/or deoxyxylulose biosynthetic pathway derivatives are expected to be found.
Among them, it can be possible to find specific or nonspecific chemical biomarkers characterizing certain sources.
In addition, the obtained NPs or selected samples will be evaluated in order to unlock their potential (e.g. antioxidant activity by different assays and corrosion inhibition potential with in-situ and ex-situ electrochemical/non-electrochemical techniques).

Research project “Research of natural products and flavours: chemical fingerprinting and unlocking the potential (NaPro-Flav)”
is funded by Croatian Science Foundation.

Project duration: 01.06.2014-01.06.2018.

Principal investigator: Prof. dr. Igor Jerković

The project participants are researchers from Faculty of Chemistry & Technology, University of Split, Faculty of Biology and Pharmacy, University of Cagliari, Italy, Polytechnics Marko Marulić in Knin, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Zagreb and Institute Ruđer Bošković, Zagreb.