As the world strives to create a more sustainable environment, green chemistry has come to the fore in attempts to minimize the use of hazardous materials and shift the focus towards renewable sources. Chlorophylls, being the definitive "green" chemical are rarely used for such purposes and this article focuses on the exploitation of this natural resource, the current applications of chlorophyl...

Plant photosynthesis is considered to consist of photochemical reactions originating from 2 separate pigment systems. Fractionation of the 2 photochemical systems has been demonstrated only recently by detergent treatment of spinach chloroplasts followed by di fferential centri ftugation ( 1, 9). This study shows that the light and heavy fractions obtained by either digitonin or Triton X-100 tr...

The chlorophylls are the main pigments in green plants, algae and other photosynthetic microorganisms. They belong to a class of pyrrole ring compounds known as porphins. Derivatives of porphins are called porphyrins. Phorbin, a porphyrin formed by the addition of another ring structure, serves as the basis for all chlorophyll molecules (Fig. 2.1). Different types of chlorophyll may arise depen...

This paper describes a robust and rapid procedure for measuring chlorophyll using a microplate reader. The procedure enables direct translation of any published equation developed on a 1-cm pathlength spectrophotometer to any format microplate with any sample volume. Chlorophylls were extracted with methanol because it is compatible with cheap polystyrene plates; however, the principles apply t...

In this study, the effect of drying procedure on the pigment levels of three traditionally used medicinal plants were determined and the contribution of the pigment compounds to the overall biological potential of these plant species was examined. The contents of total phenols, anthocyanins, carotenoids and chlorophylls a and b were determined spectrophotometrically, in fresh lemon balm (Meliss...