Anthocyanins are water-soluble plant pigments found abundantly in flesh, skin, flowers, fruit, and roots of different variety of plants such as red-colored onion, cabbage, potatoes, berries, cherries, oranges, grapes and plums. Compare to vegetables, fruits have much higher concentration of anthocyanins. In general, anthocyanins have anti-oxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-mutagenic, and anti-apoptotic activities that benefit human health, therefore, they have been recommended for food nutraceuticals to prevent and improve different diseases and health conditions such as cancers, obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.
Plant fruits form a main source for the humans to consume nutritional anthocyanins. In particular, plant fruits, such as grapes, strawberries, blackberries, apples, figs, blueberries, cranberries, and others, form main fruit foods that are consumed by the humans on the daily basis. Anthocyanins in these regular fruits have also gained intensively studied in structures, biosynthesis, genetics, and genomics. However, to our knowledge, a systemic review that can help comprehensively understand these fruit anthocyanins and their benefits to human health is lacking. Such reviews are necessary to help both scientists and publics to understand the significance anthocyanins that are part of their daily life.
Herein, we plan to edit a special issue reporting structures, elucidation methodologies, biosynthesis, and metabolic engineering of plant fruit anthocyanins. Plant fruits will include crop fruits, non-crop-fruits, model plant fruits, and non-model plant fruits. The edited special issue will present both scientists and publics comprehensive spectra of those colorful anthocyanins. It is anticipated that a large group of readers are interested in this topic.
