*Introductory Chapter: Overview of New Perspectives and Applications of Carotenoids DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.105892*

the extensive use of carotenoids in agri-foods sectors as well as in pharmaceutical industries, these pigments are an excellent example of poor understanding of food structure, the complexity of behavior during their digestion by animals, and interindividual differences in response, which lead to misinterpretation of study results. Consequently, there are a few challenges associated with understanding and measuring carotenoid bioavailability, which should be the aim of research during the next few years. Some of the most relevant challenges are following, which are grouped into two categories—challenges related to the use of carotenoids to promote positive effects on human health and challenges related to the production of natural carotenoids at a large scale by environmentally friendly procedures:

Carotenoids and human health [8]:


Production of natural carotenoids at a large scale by environmentally friendly procedures [11]:


Finally, one of the most challenging issues is the extraction of carotenoids from natural sources. So far, several extraction methods have been employed for the extraction of carotenoids—solvent extraction, Soxhlet extraction, centrifugation, and non-conventional methods of extraction, such as ultrasound-assisted, microwave-assisted, enzymatic, and the innovative technique supercritical carbon dioxide (SC–CO2) extraction.

However, apart from SC–CO2 extraction, which extracts pure compounds in high yield without the use of harmful organic solvents, the other mentioned approaches (which are the most efficient procedures to isolate pure carotenoids at high yield) are characterized by the use of large amounts of organic solvents. Consequently, green technology for carotenoid extraction is still the need of the present time to guarantee the production of marketed carotenoids for keeping safe the environmental quality for the next generations.
