Know more

Fields of Expertise: Tannin analytics; Hydrolysable tannins; Mass spectrometry; Chromatography; Structure-activity functions of tannins and other polyphenols; Chemical Ecology of tannins.

Author's details: Juha-Pekka Salminen is a group leader at the Natural Chemistry Research Group at the Department of Chemistry, University of Turku, Finland. He obtained his PhD in 2002, and has been, since 2009, a full Professor of Natural Compound Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry, University of Turku. In his PhD he studied the chemistry and chemical ecology of hydrolysable tannins of Finnish birch trees. Since then he has continued to develop and use analytical tools for the efficient and accurate detection and purification of both hydrolysable tannins and proanthocyanidins in thousands of plant species. In addition to screening the plant kingdom for the different types of tannin sub-groups and individual tannins, his group has focused on revealing many types of structure-activity patterns between tannins and their bioactivities such as oxidative activity, protein precipitation capacity, anthelmintic activitity and antimicrobial activity. Prof. Salminen is the author of some 180 peer-reviewed publications, with an h-index of 47, and has been cited over 7000 times.

Abstract: The polyphenol family contains some high-molecular weight compounds that are more challenging than others to detect and quantify accurately as individual compounds or even as groups of compounds. This fact has created and continues to create subsequent challenges for understanding their structure-activity functions. Two such groups of complex polyphenols are hydrolysable tannins and proanthocyanidins. Especially their oligomeric and polymeric forms may be difficult to separate by chromatographic tools thus making their individual detection by for instance mass spectrometry a daunting task. The presence of hundreds of hydrolysable tannins or proanthocyanidins, and even their complex mixtures in one plant species, makes it practically impossible to separate or isolate them all for structure-activity studies. This issue is further highlighted in efforts trying to widely screen the presence of various types of hydrolysable tannins and proanthocyanidins in the thousands of species present in the plant kingdom. For these large-scale efforts to be worth while, we need efficient liquid chromatography mass spectrometry tools that can accurately detect the relevant compounds, their functional units and other properties that are central in causing their bioactivities such as e.g. oxidative activity, protein precipitation activity, anthelmintic activity and antimicrobial activity.