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Sol–gel chemistry can be easily modified to the changing needs of society to produce fine‐tuned sol–gel nanostructured materials for relevant applications. In this context, there is an increasing need for natural and versatile raw materials as well as biocompatible compounds that could be extensively used as biomarkers for bioimaging in diagnosis or therapy. Silica‐based materials are widely used in the field of biomedicine due to their chemical inertness and biocompatibility. In the present paper, orange peel extract was immobilized inside inorganic silica and hybrid silica‐silsesquioxane polymeric networks. Silica and organo‐modified silica matrices were synthesized through a templated sol–gel route of TEOS and an organosilsesquioxane (octaisobutyltetracyclo[7.3.3.15,11] octasiloxane‐endo‐3,7‐diol), with D‐glucose as template, and for comparison a non‐ionic surfactant (tetraethylene glycol mono‐hexadecyl ether) was also used. The bioactive properties of the molecules from orange peel extract were preserved after immobilization in both silica and silica‐silsesquioxane networks. Moreover, the fluorescence properties were amplified by 10–20 times more than the native orange peel extract. The structural properties of the final materials have been studied by FT‐IR, UV–Vis‐NIR, and fluorescence spectroscopy. Dynamic light scattering measurements and transmission electron microscopy were used to estimate the size and morphology of the hybrid materials with orange peel extract immobilized in silica networks. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In order to characterize redox properties of biomolecules, specific methods for evaluating the antioxidant capacity of some biological structures or their components (like aminoacids) are used, such as chemiluminescence (CL) and cyclic voltametry coupled with UV-VIS spectroscopy. The CL antioxidant capacity, the reduction potential (e 1=2 ), and the anodic current intensity (I a ) have been determined by controlling the behavior of the compounds under redox conditions. The value of the half-wave potential of the first peak was correlated with the reduction tendency on the electrode, and this behavior was analyzed in relation to the antioxidant capacity observed by CL.