Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Institute of Physical Chemistry and Abbe Center of Photonics, Helmholtzweg 4, 07745 Jena, Germany.
Analyst. 2016 Jul 21;141(14):4447-55. doi: 10.1039/c6an00390g. Epub 2016 May 20.
Carotenoids are molecules that play important roles in both plant development and in the well-being of mammalian organisms. Therefore, various studies have been performed to characterize carotenoids' properties, distribution in nature and their health benefits upon ingestion. Nevertheless, there is a gap regarding a fast detection of them at the plant phase. Within this contribution we report the results obtained regarding the application of surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) toward the differentiation of two carotenoid molecules (namely, lycopene and β-carotene) in tomato samples. To this end, an e-beam lithography (EBL) SERS-active substrate and a 488 nm excitation source were employed, and a relevant simulated matrix was prepared (by mixing the two carotenoids in defined percentages) and measured. Next, carotenoids were extracted from tomato plants and measured as well. Finally, a combination of principal component analysis and partial least squares regression (PCA-PLSR) was applied to process the data, and the obtained results were compared with HPLC measurements of the same extracts. A good agreement was obtained between the HPLC and the SERS results for most of the tomato samples.
类胡萝卜素在植物发育和哺乳动物机体健康中都起着重要作用。因此，人们进行了各种研究来描述类胡萝卜素的特性、在自然界中的分布以及摄入它们带来的健康益处。然而，在植物阶段快速检测它们仍存在空白。在本研究中，我们报告了应用表面增强拉曼光谱（SERS）来区分番茄样品中两种类胡萝卜素分子（即番茄红素和β-胡萝卜素）的结果。为此，我们使用了电子束光刻（EBL）SERS 活性衬底和 488nm 的激发源，并准备了一个相关的模拟基质（通过以特定比例混合这两种类胡萝卜素来测量）。然后，我们从番茄植物中提取类胡萝卜素并进行了测量。最后，我们应用主成分分析和偏最小二乘回归（PCA-PLSR）来处理数据，并将获得的结果与相同提取物的 HPLC 测量值进行比较。对于大多数番茄样品，HPLC 和 SERS 的结果之间存在良好的一致性。
