Chemical Compositions and Antioxidant Activities of Thirty-Seven Typical Pomegranates Grown in China

Abstract

The chemical compositions of juice and peel from 37 cultivars of pomegranates grown in China were identified using UPLC-Q TOF MS. The total phenolic contents and antioxidant activities of pomegranate juice and peel samples were also determined to make comparisons of their potential nutraceutical values. A total of 20 and 25 compounds were tentatively identified from the juice and peel samples. For the antioxidant activities of juice samples, No. 32 from Italy showed greatest abilities in scavenging DPPH and ABTS free radicals, and a registered novel cultivar No. 24 showed greatest value in scavenging oxygen radical. For the peel samples, No. 8 from Anhui Province of China showed generally greater values in all the three assays. All these results showed that different cultivars of pomegranate have different amounts of bioactive components and antioxidant activities, and development about the byproduct of these pomegranates after industrial processing should be focused in the future.