Photosynthetic pigments are bioactive compounds of great importance for the food, cosmetic, and pharmaceutical industries. They are not only responsible for capturing solar energy to carry out photosynthesis, but also play a role in photoprotective processes and display antioxidant activity, all of which contribute to effective biomass and oxygen production. Diatoms are organisms of a distinct ...

background and objectives: safflower (carthamus tinctorious l.) florets contain valuable red and yellow pigments and are used in food, textile dying, and pharmaceutical industries. red carthamine pigment is formed from a yellow precursor, precarthamine, through an oxidation reaction at the end of flowers' maturation stage. the present study was conducted to find out the most effective procedure...

IN a series of papers Palmer and his co-workers have shown that many animal pigments are derived from carotene and xanthophyll [Palmer and Eckles 1914; Palmer and Kempster 1919], therefore it was thought desirable to find out if urochrome also is derived from plant pigments. Preliminary experiments were performed with human urine. The urine was collected in twenty-four hour samples, preserved w...

Colour and pattern are key traits with important roles in camouflage, warning and attraction. Ideally, in order to begin to understand the evolution and ecology of colour in nature, it is important to identify and, where possible, fully characterise pigments using biochemical methods. The phylum Mollusca includes some of the most beautiful exemplars of biological pigmentation, with the vivid co...

Being the largest land mammals, elephants have very few natural enemies and are active during both day and night. Compared with those of diurnal and nocturnal animals, the eyes of elephants and other arrhythmic species, such as many ungulates and large carnivores, must function in both the bright light of day and dim light of night. Despite their fundamental importance, the roles of photosensit...

Earlier we reported that Rayleigh matches made by males with normal color vision fall into distinct groups, and proposed that this behavior reflects an X-chromosome linked polymorphism in the spectral positioning of cone pigments (Neitz & Jacobs, 1986). In the present experiments two different color matches were obtained from each of 60 color normal males. Comparisons of the data from these two...

Raman spectroscopy has become one of the most important vibrational analytical techniques for the investigation of paint samples and notably for organic pigments. For the analysis of modern materials, especially for synthetic inorganic and organic pigments the prospect of using Raman spectroscopy is an alternative to e.g. Py-GC-MS. It provides enough information allowing for a broad characteriz...

(FT) Raman spectroscopy is used for the first time to identify pigments used in 19 & 20 century Japanese and Vietnamese Lacquerwares. IR spectroscopy is used to assess the Lacquer matrix. Different operative conditions and parameters were experimented with on a limited number of lacquerwares in order to determine the optimal procedure for the identification of pigments/dyes as potential chronol...