Sustainable Agriculture Reviews 34 Date Palm for Food, Medicine and the Environment

This book is the result of remarkable contribution from the experts of interdisciplinary fields of Science with comprehensive, in-depth and up-to-date research and reviews. It describes the applications of date palm for food, medicine and the environmental sectors. Date palm is one of the oldest cultivated trees and its fruit has been a dietary staple around the world for many centuries. Date pulps contain dietary fibers and easily digestible sugars (70%), mainly glucose, sucrose and fructose. They also contain vitamins like biotin, thiamine, riboflavin, ascorbic and folic acid that are important for our body. The date palm fruit has been used in folk remedies for the treatment of various infectious diseases, cancer and immuno-modulatory activity. Date stones and date palm leaves are freely and abundantly available biomass. Therefore, the renovation of agricultural biomass wastes into activated carbons for drinking water purification, wastewater treatment, treatment of dyes, and metal-ions from aqueous solution would add value to agricultural commodities which offer a solution to environmental problems as well as reduce the cost of waste disposal. 

Preface: Mu. Naushad and E. Lichtfouse
Chapter 1. Date palm as a healthy food; P. Senthil Kumar, P.R. Yaashikaa
Chapter 2. Analysis of antioxidants and nutritional assessment of date palm fruits; B.M. Gnanamangai, S. Saranya, P. Ponmurugan, S. Kavitha, P. Sudhagar, P. Divya
Chapter 3. Nutritional and therapeutic applications of date palm from date palm; Prabu Periyathambi, Hemalatha Thiagarajan, Suganthan Veerachamy
Chapter 4. Chemical Composition of Date Pits: Potential to Extract and Characterize the Lipid Fraction; Asif Ahmad, Hifsa Imtiaz
Chapter 5. Biogas production from date palm fruits; P. Senthil Kumar and Femina Carolin
Chapter 6. Valorization of waste date seeds for green carbon catalysts and biodiesel synthesis; Ala’a H. Al-Muhtaseb, Farrukh Jamil, Lamya Al Haj, Eyas Mahmoud, Mohamed Becherif, Sikander Rafiq
Chapter 7. Different extraction methods, physical properties and chemical composition of date seed oil; Jawhar Fakhfakh, Sahar Ben-Youssef, Mu. Naushad and Noureddine Allouche
Chapter 8. Production of glucose and lactic acid from cellulosic date palm wastes by enzymatic fermentation; Muhammad Tauseef Azam, Asif Ahmad
Chapter 9. Application of date-palm fibers for the wastewater treatment; Marija Nujic, Natalija Velic, Mirna Habuda-Stanic
Chapter 10. Recent updates on heavy metal remediation using date stones (Phoenix dactylifera L.) - Date fruit processing industry waste; N. Sivarajasekar, J. Prakashmaran, S. Poornima, S. Sivapriya, V. Gayathri, T. Pradeepika, V. Raghu, Mu. Naushad, S. Sivamani, Swapnil Dharaskar, Nirajan Dhakal
Chapter 11. Removal of toxins from the environment using date palm seeds; Basma Al-Najar, Mohamed Bououdina, J. Judith Vijaya, Radhika R Nair, Tetiana Tatarchuk
Chapter 12. Date palm based activated carbon for the efficient removal of organic dyes from aqueous environment; Shamik Chowdhury, Sharadwata Pan,  Rajasekhar Balasubramanian, Papita Das
Chapter 13. Date palm assisted nanocomposite materials for the removal of nitrate and phosphate from aqueous medium; Mirna Habuda-Stanic, Marija Nujic, Blanca Magdalena Gonzalez Silva, Sveinung Saegrov, Stein Wold Østerhus, Mario Siljeg

Dr. Mu. Naushad is working as Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry, College of Science, King Saud University (KSU), Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He obtained his M.Sc and Ph.D Degree in Analytical chemistry from Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India in 2002 and 2007, respectively.  He has vast research experience in the multidisciplinary fields of Analytical Chemistry, Materials Chemistry and Environmental Science. He hold^5000 citations with a Google Scholar H-Index of >44. He has successfully run several research projects funded by National plan for Science and Technology (NPST) and King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He is the editor/editorial member of several reputed Journals like Scientific Report (Nature); Process Safety & Environmental Protection (Elsevier); Journal of Water Process Engineering (Elsevier) and International Journal of Environmental Research & Public Health (MDPI). He is also the associate editor for Environmental Chemistry Letters (Springer) and Nanotechnology for Environmental Engineering Journal (Springer). He has been awarded by the Scientist of the year award-2015 from National Environmental Science Academy, Delhi, India and Almarai Award-2017, Saudi Arabia.

Eric Lichtfouse, PhD, born in 1960, is an environmental chemist working at the University of Aix-Marseille, France. He has invented carbon-13 dating, a method allowing to measure the relative age and turnover of molecular organic compounds occurring in different temporal pools of any complex media. He is teaching scientific writing and communication, and has published the book Scientific Writing for Impact Factors, which includes a new tool – the Micro-Article - to identify the novelty of research results. He is founder and Chief Editor of scientific journals and series in environmental chemistry and agriculture. He got the Analytical Chemistry Prize by the French Chemical Society, the Grand Prize of the Universities of Nancy and Metz, and a Journal Citation Award by the Essential Indicators.