No abstract

A new, simple procedure for the determination of phenolic components of wines, such as resveratrol and piceid isomers, has been elaborated and validated. A set of 70 red wines and 3 white wines from two wineries (Polgar Winery and Bock Winery, Villany, Hungary) are analyzed by reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography. The samples are injected without pretreatment and UV-vis and mass spectrometric (MS) detection has been applied. The detection limit for trans-resveratrol and for trans-piceid is found to be 0.9 and 0.6 pmol for the UV-vis detection method and 0.3 and 0.2 pmol for the MS detection method. Trans-resveratrol and trans-piceid are found in red wines from 0.1 to 14.3 mg/L and from 3.8 to 16.4 mg/L concentrations, respectively.

The fast, high-throughput distinction between paleoanthropological remains and recent forensic/clinical bone samples is of vital importance in the field of medicolegal science. In this paper, a novel screening method has been described, using the crystallinity index (C.I.) and carbonate-phosphate index (C/P) as a means to distinguish between archeological and forensic anthropological skeletal findings. According to the Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy analyses, the archeological bone samples are characterized by a range of C.I. between 2.84 and 3.78 and by low C/P values of 0.10-0.33, while the C.I. and C/P ranges of forensic skeletal remains are 2.55-3.18 and 0.38-0.88, respectively. Significant (p < 0.05) changes were observed in C/P as well as C.I. values between the groups of forensic and archeological skeletal samples. The suggested dating method needs only a few milligramms of bone tissue; thus, it can be extremely useful for distiguishing ancient and recent bone fragments.

From an extract of red mamey (Pouteria sapota) β-cryptoxanthin-5,6-epoxide, β-cryptoxanthin-5',6'-epoxide, 3'-deoxycapsanthin, and cryptocapsin were isolated and characterized by UV-vis spectroscopy, electronic circular dichroism (ECD), nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, and mass spectrometry (MS). Epoxidation of β-cryptoxanthin delivered the β-(5'R,6'S)- and (5'S,6'R)-cryptoxanthin-5',6'-epoxides, which were identified by HPLC-ECD analysis. These carotenoids among others are quite common in the fruits of Central America, and as they are natural provitamins A, they should play an important role in the diet of the mostly vitamin A deficient population of this region.