• apples
• flavonoids
• coating
• UV-B

Over the past few years, there has been great care to study the relationship between dietary patterns and human health. Despite many available diets and physic exercise programs for losing and keeping weight, interest in the use of complementary and alternative medicine for obesity, for cardiovascular and for degenerative diseases treatments, have been greatly increased. Technologies able to ensure high quality food products with high levels of the desired compounds are needed in order to enhance the health benefits. Thus, many authors focused their attention on the nutraceutical properties of food, especially fruits and vegetables. Many protective effects of fruits and vegetables has been attributed to flavonoids, secondary plant metabolites, associated with a reduced risk of cancer, chronic inflammations, cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases. Being phytochemicals, flavonoids cannot be synthesized by humans, so the dietary intake of these phenol compounds might become essential. One of the main challenge is to identify the way the flavonoids can be much more available for humans and how the research is able to improve the knowledge about flavonoids biochemistry inside food. By this purpose in the last years many authors try to comprehend if the use of edible coatings can enhance flavonoids amount and how these coatings can interact with human metabolism. In addition, it has been already demonstrated that flavonoids are very strong absorbers of UV-B radiation and their accumulation may take place as consequence of UV-B effect. Among fruits and vegetables, apples have a widely profile of flavonoids that allow to think them as a great source of this secondary plant metabolites and are greatly distributed around the world during the whole year. The aim of this work is to detect if an edible coating made by collagen is able to enhance the phenol profile of Fuji apples during different times of detection. In addition, post-harvest irradiation with UV-B was performed in order to evaluate which kind of interactions might be appeared between samples with coating and UV-B irradiation. Hence, while in the first experiment the study provides information about the coating influence on the shelf life of apples, the second one had the purpose to observe if apple reaction after UV-B is the same with or without coating, according with previous data already shown in literature. The phenolic components of our extracts were identified by HPLC-MS analysis and the quantifications were carried out at different wavelengths, depending on the class of membership of phenol compound. Statistical analysis of the outcomes between the concentrations of the compounds examined are defined by Tukey-Kramer Multiple-Comparison test with significant level data P<0.05. In the second experiment it was performed both the statistical analysis of variance (ANOVA) with the same significant level data and the multivariate-discriminant analysis among the different concentrations of the coated and uncoated compounds after UV-B exposure. The software used was NCSS for both the experiments.