Comparative in vitro antioxidant capacity and terpenoid profiling of pumpkin fruit pulps from a Serbian cucurbita maxima and cucurbita moschata breeding collection

Abstract

Pumpkin is considered a healthy and functional food. The consumption of pumpkins and pumpkin-based foods has been shown to confer several beneficial effects on human health due to their antioxidant capacity and terpenoid content. Consequently, this study aimed to characterize the in vitro antioxidant capacity (using FRAP and ABTS assays), terpenoid profile (using an untar-geted lipidomics approach via high-resolution UHPLC-Orbitrap mass spectrometry), and carote-noid content (by HPLC-DAD) in pumpkin fruit pulp from accessions differing for species (11 Cu-curbita maxima and 9 Cucurbita moschata), cultivar, and origin, belonging to a Serbian breeding col-lection. These accessions are candidates for inclusion within programs intended to improve pumpkin fruit quality. The results obtained in this work allowed us to highlight the best marker com-pounds, discriminating both the region of accession collection or breeding (“origin”) and the plant species. Furthermore, our findings have helped to identify the most suitable antioxidant-rich varieties to select for national breeding programs for improving human health. These findings provide valuable information to the overall current understanding of the potential health benefits of pumpkins and the discriminant triterpenoids underlying the C. maxima and C. moschata accessions investigated here, which include those of Serbian and non-Serbian origin.