Abstract:

The exploitation and utilization of secondary metabolites of forest source is an important approach to play the forest as "treasure houses". Natural forest-derived flavonoids from Citrus aurantium which exhibit significant biological activities have been widely used in the fields of food and medicine. However, some bottleneck problems such as low resource utilization rate, unclear bioactivity mechanism, poor water solubility and low bioavailability, seriously restrict the sustainable development of the industry. This paper reviews the extraction, bioactivity and modification of flavonoids from Citrus aurantium. The extraction methods of the flavonoids were reviewed, while the strategies to strengthen the quality transfer process and the extraction mechanism were proposed. The main biological activities and potential mechanisms of the flavonoids were introduced, and the strategies to increase the flavonoids utilization value through chemical structure modification or embed technology were summarizeed. Meanwhile, the suggestions for future research were proposed. 1) The multi-extraction technology or multi-component extraction methods can be utilized to achieve efficient extraction of the flavonoids to improve the utilization efficiency of resources, and the migration behavior of substances during the extraction process may be revealed with the help of mass transfer models and characterization techniques. 2) The structure-activity relationship between chemical structure and biological activity can be further studied by means of experiment combining with computational chemistry to expound biological activities and their mechanisms. 3) The computational chemical methods can be used to accurately design modification strategies and interpret modification machines to modify the flavonoids.

Key words: Citrus aurantium, flavonoids, extraction, bioactivity, modification