Even though traditionally date-fruit has been featured by a marginal use, mainly restricted to its dietary intake, in recent years, it has raised the range of applications for this agro-food production. These new uses have entailed an enlarged production of date fruits and, simultaneously, of date palm byproducts. Encouraged by the traditional medicinal uses of dates, according to their phytochemical composition, the present work was focused on the evaluation of a new family of secondary metabolites, the plant oxylipins phytoprostanes (PhytoPs) and phytofurans (PhytoFs), in six separate matrixes of the date palm edible parts and byproducts, applying an UHPLC-ESI-QqQ-MS/MS-based methodology. The evaluation for the first time of date palm edible parts and byproducts as a dietary source of PhytoPs and PhytoFs provides evidence on the value of six different parts (pulp, skin, pits, leaves, clusters, and pollen) regarding their content in these plant oxylipins evidenced by the presence of the PhytoPs, 9-F1t-PhytoP (201.3-7223.1 ng/100 g dw) and 9-epi-9-F1t-PhytoP (209.7-7297.4 ng/100 g dw), and the PhytoFs ent-16(RS)-9-epi-ST-Δ14-10-PhytoF (4.6-191.0 ng/100g dw), and ent-16(RS)-13-epi-ST-Δ14-9-PhytoF as the most abundant compounds. Regarding the diverse matrixes assessed, pollen, clusters, and leaves for PhytoPs and skins and pollen for PhytoFs were identified as the most interesting sources of these compounds. In this concern, the information obtained upon the detailed characterization performed in the present work will allow unravelling the biological interest of PhytoPs and PhytoFs and the extent to which these compounds could exert valuable biological activities upon in vitro (mechanistic) and in vivo studies, allocating the effort-focus on the chemical species of PhytoPs and PhytoFs responsible for such traits.
Keywords: UHPLC−ESI-QqQ-MS/MS; byproducts; date palm; phytofurans; phytoprostanes; targeted metabolomics.