1. Introduction
Plants of the Cactaceae family are xerophytes, mostly distributed in desert areas [
1]. This family has a great socioeconomic importance. Their members are used as ornamental plants, food, and fodder [
2]. Prickly pear (OFI) a Cactaceae native to the American continent, is cultivated in Mexico because of its gastronomic use and can be found in 29 of 32 states of Mexico [
3], and because of its cultural use, Mexico has the largest cactus cultivation (50 000 - 70 000 ha), however, it is also cultivated in other continents [
4].
Prickly pear cladodes are used to prepare various foods. The fruit, which is a berry of thick shell and full of seeds with a mild and sweet flavor, known as tuna, has little acidity and is commonly used to prepare beverages (liquors) and sweets. Tunas are divided according to their color (green, red, yellow, and purple), which depends on the species and maturation [
5]. Due to their production and easy propagation in arid zones and its application in areas other than food, studies have been conducted on tuna’s composition (85 % water, 15 % sugars and less than 1 % protein). The chemical composition of OFI varies depending on the species, age of the cladodes, the type of soil where it is grown, and the season of the year [
6,
8].
OFI’s peel is acidic and contains polysaccharides, sterols, lipids, fat-soluble vitamins, and pigments such as chlorophylls, betalains, coumarins and carotenoids [
9]. These compounds are secondary metabolites and have been previously determined using different methodologies, demonstrating the presence of polyphenols and compounds of interest, such as acids and tannins [
10,
13]. Tannins are phenolic compounds that are distributed in the plant kingdom [
14], they are by-products of plant metabolism that are synthesized in response to external stimuli (stress) [
15,
16]. They participate in the response or defense of plants against the attack of microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi. They also take part in the plant’s survival under drought and are classified as hydrolyzable and condensed [
17].
Tannins have biological properties with different industrial applications as antitumor, antimicrobial, antioxidant, and anti-hyperglycemic activities [
18]. Different methods have been used to obtain these compounds; solid-liquid extraction. This method prefers the use of water as a solvent for environmental reasons, but even so, NaOH, Na
2CO
3 and NaHSO
3 are used, having drawbacks, such as long extraction times, large amounts of solvents, the use of expensive ionic liquids, making difficult the solute recovery, so solvents such as ethanol, methanol, acetone, N,N-dimethylammonium-N',N'-dimethylcarbamate and 1-butyl-3-methylimidazole bromide (DIMCARB) are also used, nevertheless, these solvents are not environmentally friendly and long times and high temperatures are still needed for the extraction [
19]. These examples are the reason to investigate alternative ways to obtain and extract these compounds. An alternative is SSF. Fermentation has been practiced for centuries to produce different foods such as sufu, tapai, koji and kimchi. In the case of SSF, a microorganism is cultivated in a solid organic material, where moist (in the absence or near absence of free water) and a non-soluble material, act as a support and nutrient source for the growth of the microorganism, and it has been considered in the last 20 years as an important and viable food processing for the bioconversion of agro-industrial waste [
20,
21].
This process promotes the bioavailability of the compounds present in the material used, since the microorganisms used can synthesize enzymes that break the cell wall, propitiating the mobilization of compounds of interest towards the extraction solvent [
22]. The fermentation process performs the conversion of complex organic substances into simpler ones, modifying the product physiochemically, improving its quality and the bioavailability of the nutrients present in the substrate [
23]. Among the most used microorganisms in SSF are filamentous fungi, such as
Aspergillus, Fusarium, Penicillium, Rhizopus and
Trichoderma [
24,
25], although the use of yeasts and some species of actinobacteria is also reported [
26]. SSF is an advantageous method for filamentous fungi, since it is very similar to their natural habitat, which can lead to higher enzymatic productivity compared to submerged fermentation [
27]. SSF shows as advantages the low production of wastewater, it does not produce foam, the substrates are low cost (product waste), low substrate volumes, low moisture content (thus avoiding contamination), but it also shows disadvantages as heterogeneous media, preventing adequate mixing, moisture levels that are difficult to control, and variables with little precise control (pH, temperature, and dissolved oxygen) [
28]. SSF has different applications, such as biodetoxification of agroindustrial waste, obtaining enzymes, unicellular proteins, production of biofuels, biofertilizers and obtaining organic acids such as gallic acid [
21,
25]. Therefore, the valorization of agroindustrial waste such as prickly pear peel is viable for obtaining compounds of interest for their biological activities through SSF [
29,
30] even previously SSF has been performed on OFI to improve its protein content and be used as fodder, using yeasts such as
Saccharomyces cerevisiae [
31] and
Kluyveromyces marxianus [
32] so it is feasible to ferment OFI peels but also to obtain bioactive compounds such as tannins. Therefore, the objective of the present work is to evaluate the conditions of the SSF process from prickly pear (OFI) peel and a strain of
Aspergillus sp., for the accumulation of tannins with antioxidant and antimicrobial activities.