Evaluation of strawberry nutritional quality

Fruits and vegetables are the food matrices with the higher amount of bioactive compounds: in particular, among fruits, strawberries are receiving in the last years an increasing attention, also by the scientific community, for the large evidences about their health benefits for the final consumer. These bioactive molecules (polyphenols and vitamins in particular) are responsible for the nutritional properties of strawberries, giving the biological functions they exert. Among these, vitamin B9 (folates) and vitamin C represent fundamental and essential vitamins for the human well-being, giving that, beside the antioxidant capacity, they exert many other biological functions in the human body, and they have to be assumed through the diet because the body is not capable to produce them by itself. The importance of the presence of these molecules in strawberries is more and more increasing, and for this reason many analytical method dedicated to strawberries have been developed during last years. On the light of this, the Department of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Sciences (D3A) of Università Politecnica delle Marche (UNIVPM) in the last years applied the most updated HPLC-UV-FLD techniques for the analysis of these vitamins in strawberries. In particular, they are developing a breeding program with the aim of create new strawberry genotypes with increased nutritional quality, in terms of vitamin C and B9. In this study, many strawberry cultivars were compared with new selections deriving from D3A breeding program for the content of vitamin C and B9, through the HPLC-UV-FLD analysis. The results showed that many new selections showed higher content of both vitamins than cultivars, indicating the efficiency of the breeding program to create new selections with improved vitamins content, but also confirming the HPLC methods used as suitable for the definition of strawberry nutritional quality in terms of vitamins C and B9 content.