Phytochemicals in bioenergy crops

The use of natural compounds derived from agricultural crops and other plants as health promoting chemicals gains tremendous growing interest in various industrial sectors as well as among people worldwide. These chemicals have been more and more employed by the food industry as food additives, functional food ingredients, nutraceuticals, by feedstuffs industry, but also by the cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries. The general idea for this interest is to use natural products as potential alternatives to synthetic chemicals. On the other hand, some plants characterized by high yield and being used as energy crops also contained significant amount of bioactive compounds. This review focuses on the wide spectrum of the phytochemicals present in available biomass plants. It is supposed that extraction of bioactive chemicals from energy crops before their energetic use may increase economical effectiveness, providing simultaneously a double benefit in the form of phytochemicals and bioenergy as value added products. This remains in line with bioeconomy, which is defined by European Commission as “the production of renewable biological resources and the conversion of these resources and waste streams into value added products, such as food, feed, bio-based products and bioenergy”. However, the issue is still a challenging effort due to the high costs, technology readiness and regulatory hurdles.