“…McFarlane noted the similarity of the absorption spectra of aqueous cobalt(II) nitrate solutions and [Fe(bpy) 3 ] 2+ and proposed the former as a colorimetric standard for calibration [279]. This colorimetric method rapidly became the method of choice for the analysis of iron in a wide range of materials and the technique was applied, inter alia, to the determination of the iron content of hematin and cytochrome c [286], water [287,288,289,290], milk [291], beer [292,293], other foodstuffs [294,295,296,297,298,299,300,301], soil and minerals [302,303,304,305,306], teeth [307,308], blood [285,309,310,311,312,313,314] and other biological materials [315,316,317,318,319] and homeopathic formulations [320]. It was recognized that the methods using bpy for the determination of iron gave a measure of the "available" iron, and any Fe that was strongly bound in heme proteins or ferritin would not necessarily be included in the total iron [321,322].…”