Clove (Syzygium aromaticum) polysaccharides

Abstract

Clove (Syzygium aromaticum) belongs to the family of Myrtaceae (130–150 genera and around 3000 species); one of the most common plant families in terms of food uses and application in the food industry, thanks to their unique organoleptic and therapeutic properties (Devkota and Adhikari-Devkota, 2020). It is native to the Maluku islands in eastern Indonesia; however, recently, it has been cultivated in different regions in the world (Hussein et al., 2019). Clove tree is composed of leaves and buds, and it has a single flower of 1–2 cm long (Saeed et al., 2021). Three different stages of clove flowering bud have been reported by Kasai et al. (2016), which include phase 1 that is characterized with the green color and budding stage, phase II with the pink color and flowering stage, and the last phase with the fruiting stage and distinctive red color. They further emphasized that the clove bud’s full-budding stage is the most economic value of the clove phases. Plant-based polysaccharides are a group of bioactive natural products with a high molecular weight with increasing interest in recent years and have several attractive biological activities (Mohan et al., 2020). The approved polysaccharides for food products formulation with industrial applications are referred as food polysaccharides, with the main function of boosting the textural attributes of the foods. Naturally, these biomolecules tend to form complexes with other types of biomolecules, such as proteins and lipids (Lu et al., 2019; Yang et al., 2020; Beaumont et al., 2021). Food polysaccharides are well known for their remarkable rheological properties (thickening, stabilizing, and gelling) and for their emulsifying properties. Furthermore, their use at a very low concentration may significantly impact the textural properties of the food products (Bernaerts et al., 2019; Yang et al., 2020; Guimara˜es et al., 2020). Unfortunately, very little information could be found in the literature, and few studies were reported regarding the polysaccharides from clove extracts; therefore, this chapter provides an overview of the clove (S. aromaticum) polysaccharides composition, structure, and biological activities, as well as their reported mode/mechanism of action.