European Journal of Biotechnology and Bioscience

Bitter orange is a citrus of the Rutaceae family that includes several important fruits such as oranges, mandarins, limes, lemons and grapefruit. Citrus fruits have an important economic value for their essential oils. These are obtained as processing by-products of processed citrus fruits and are the most widely used in the world. Indeed, these citrus essential oils and their important components have gained acceptance in the food and pharmaceutical industries.

In the context of the discovery of new antioxidants from natural sources, we were interested in this work in the preliminary study by phytochemical screening and confirmation by analytical separation of a technique (TLC) micro-components extracts and quantification of total phenols, flavonoids and tannins by the Folin-Ciocaleu reagent, Aluminum trichloride and vanillin respectively. Finally, the evaluation of the antioxidant activity of the C. Aurantium fruit essential oil is carried out by the DPPH method and its extraction is carried out by hydro-distillation.

The results obtained showed the fruit richness in phenolic compounds mainly polyphenols (144.32±3.42 mg EAG/g of FVM) and flavonoids (39.21±1.00 mg EQ/g of FVM) thus, the existence of an antioxidant activity of the essential oil of the whole fruit of C. Aurantium (IC50=15.2±0.11µg/ml) but less effective than that of vitamin C (IC50=0.0027±0.26 μg/ml).