Brine, the historically known food additive salt solution, has been widely used as a pickling media to preserve flavor or enhance food aroma, appearance, or other qualities. The influence of pickling, using brine, on the aroma compounds and the primary and secondary metabolite profile in onion bulb Allium cepa red cv. and lemon fruit Citrus limon was evaluated using multiplex metabolomics technologies. In lemon, pickling negatively affected its key odor compound “citral”, whereas monoterpene hydrocarbons limonene and γ-terpinene increased in the pickled product. Meanwhile, in onion sulphur rearrangement products appeared upon storage, i.e., 3,5-diethyl-1,2,4-trithiolane. Profiling of the polar secondary metabolites in lemon fruit via ultra-performance liquid chromatography coupled to MS annotated 37 metabolites including 18 flavonoids, nine coumarins, five limonoids, and two organic acids. With regard to pickling impact, notable and clear separation among specimens was observed with an orthogonal projections to least squares-discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) score plot for the lemon fruit model showing an enrichment of limonoids and organic acids and that for fresh onion bulb showing an abundance of flavonols and saponins. In general, the pickling process appeared to negatively impact the abundance of secondary metabolites in both onion and lemon, suggesting a decrease in their food health benefits.

Asteraceae, often known as Compositae, is one of the largest angiospermic plant families among dicotyledonous, based on the enormous number of species (1,620 genera and 23,600 species). The Asteraceae family includes several large and widely dispersed genus, Artemisia being one of the most common in the Northern Hemisphere. There are 500 species of the genus Artemisia worldwide. Several species of Artemisia have been reported to contain numerous phytochemicals such as polyphenols, phenolic acids, flavonoids, acetylenes and triterpene. Artemisia monosperma (Delile) is a perennial fragrant plant that grows widely in the deserts of Middle East, Africa and China. This plant is commonly used in folk medicine as a remedy of a wide range of illness. The choice of the plant was based on the good previous biological study of A. monosperma plant extract it was found to have anticancer, antimicrobial and anti-diabetic activities. This review highlights the phytochemical constituents of this important and valuable genus as well as its different reported biological activities. Definitively, the plant extract of A. monosperma good source of health strengthening constituents which can be used for curative and nutritional purposes, therefore there is need for further studies on the active compounds of this plant so as to optimize their medicinal and nutritional values.