The chemical diversity of antioxidants makes it difficult to separate and quantify antioxidants from the vegetable matrix. Therefore, it is desirable to establish a method that can measure the total antioxidant activity level directly from vegetable extracts. The current literature clearly states that there is no "total antioxidant" as a nutritional index available for food labeling because of the lack of standard quantitation methods. Thus, this work reports the development of a simple, widely applicable antioxidant capacity index for dietary polyphenols and vitamins C and E, utilizing the copper(II)-neocuproine [Cu(II)-Nc] reagent as the chromogenic oxidizing agent. Because the copper(II) (or cupric) ion reducing ability of polyphenols is measured, the method is named by our research group "cupric reducing antioxidant capacity" abbreviated as the CUPRAC method. This method should be advantageous over the ferric reducing antioxidant power (FRAP) method because the redox chemistry of copper(II)-as opposed to that of ferric ion-involves faster kinetics. The method comprises mixing of the antioxidant solution (directly or after acid hydrolysis) with a copper(II) chloride solution, a neocuproine alcoholic solution, and an ammonium acetate aqueous buffer at pH 7 and subsequent measurement of the developed absorbance at 450 nm after 30 min. Because the color development is fast for compounds such as ascorbic acid, gallic acid, and quercetin but slow for naringin and naringenin, the latter compounds were assayed after incubation at 50 degrees C on a water bath for 20 min [after Cu(II)-Nc reagent addition] so as to force the oxidation reaction to reach completion. The flavonoid glycosides were hydrolyzed to their corresponding aglycons by refluxing in 1.2 M HCl-containing 50% MeOH so as to exert maximal reducing power toward Cu(II)-Nc. Certain compounds also needed incubation after acid hydrolysis to fully exhibit their reducing capability. The CUPRAC antioxidant capacities of synthetic mixtures of antioxidants were experimentally measured as Trolox equivalents and compared to those theoretically found by making use of the principle of additivity of absorbances assuming no chemical interaction between the mixture constituents. Because ascorbic acid is not resistant to elevated temperature incubation, it should be assayed initially by measuring the absorbance (at 450 nm) difference of original and ascorbate oxidase-added mixture solutions at the end of 1 min of Cu(II)-Nc reagent addition. Thus, the total CUPRAC antioxidant capacity of a mixture containing various antioxidants should be that finally measured after a suitable combination of hydrolysis and incubation procedures, added to the initially measured capacity due to ascorbate. The antioxidant polyphenolic compounds tested demonstrate that the highest capacities in the CUPRAC method were observed for epicatechin gallate, epigallocatechin gallate, quercetin, fisetin, epigallocatechin, catechin, and caffeic acid in this order, in accordance with theoretical expectati...

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