Journal
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 135, Issue 1, Pages 272-279Publisher
AMER CHEMICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1021/ja308930a
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Funding
- Danish National Research Foundation
- ANPCyT (Argentina)
- CONICET (Argentina)
- Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology
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Carotenoids, and beta-carotene in particular, are important natural antioxidants. Singlet oxygen, the lowest excited state of molecular oxygen, is an intermediate often involved in natural oxidation reactions. The fact that beta-carotene efficiently quenches singlet oxygen in solution-phase systems is invariably invoked when explaining the biological antioxidative properties of beta-carotene. We recently developed unique microscope-based time-resolved spectroscopic methods that allow us to directly examine singlet oxygen in mammalian cells. We now demonstrate that intracellular singlet oxygen, produced in a photosensitized process, is in fact not efficiently deactivated by beta-carotene. This observation requires a re-evaluation of beta-carotene's role as an antioxidant in mammalian systems and now underscores the importance of mechanisms by which beta-carotene inhibits radical reactions.
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