Anticorrosive activity and chemical fingerprinting of pineapple byproducts

Food by-products are often considered to have no commercial value for industries and are usually discarded during processing, eventually contributing to environmental pollution. Ananas comosus (L.) Merr. (Bromeliaceae), known as pineapple, occurs in tropical countries such as Brazil. Pineapple by-products represent 49% of the fruit mass compared to the edible part. The aim of this study was to investigate new methods for application of pineapple by-products due to their chemical composition and anticorrosive activity. Therefore, we created PineappleChemData, a database populated with previously described compounds extracted from pineapple, with 1124 compounds indexed as of January 2025. We then queried this database using the results from chemical analyses of different fractions of pineapple wastes (bagasse, peel, and crown) carried out using liquid phase chromatography coupled to high-resolution mass spectrometry (LC-HRMS). The chemical compositions of different pineapple fractions were elucidated through dereplication of results, with 102 compounds annotated in total. This study also demonstrates that pineapple by-product fractions have anticorrosive activity, with weight loss and electrochemical measurements obtained from corrosion inhibition assays, suggesting the peel fraction is the most efficient source of anticorrosive activity.