Bucharest) ♦ 61♦ Nr

Ukrainian museum and monasteries preserve a large number of parchment and leather documents dated from the 14 th to the 19 th centuries. As any organic structure, these materials are subjected to the destructive processes due to physico-chemical (light, humidity, temperature, pollutants, etc

Vegetal bioproducts with antioxidant activity for prophylactic and therapeutic effect

This paper presents the extractive technological process and processing of the selective vegetal extracts from the Rosmarinus officinalis L. species in order to obtain some vegetal bioproducts with proven antioxidant activity. By combining various active fractions, new vegetal bioproducts have been obtained and have been physically and chemically characterised (infrared, ultraviolet visible spectroscopy, chemiluminescence, determination of flavonoids, polyphenols, and polyphenolcarboxilic acids content) and finaly biologically tested. The antioxidant activity of Rosmarinus officinalis extracts have been evaluated by two techniques, in vitro chemiluminescence and ex vivo biological tests, both of them recommending the vegetal bioproducts for prophylactic and therapeutic purposes

NIR Study of Chemically Modified Cellulosic Biopolymers

Near-infrared spectral analysis was useful to quantify the ester content of chemically modified cellulose and lignocellulosics. Two kinds of samples were studied, as long aliphatic-chain cellulose esters and wood sawdust chemically-modified either by anhydrides or by ethylene carbonate. It was possible to determine the degree of substitution (DS) of such samples through a correlation by partial least square (PLS) of second-order derivative of NIR spectra. This technique was efficient even when DS values were low, which is difficult to do by using FTIR. It was also possible to distinguish reagent molecules that were attached to the cellulosic substrate by hydrogen bonding from those linked by covalent bonding

Spectroscopic parameters of the cuticle and ethanol extracts of the fluorescent cave isopod Mesoniscus graniger (Isopoda, Oniscidea)

The body surface of the terrestrial isopod Mesoniscus graniger (Frivaldsky, 1863) showed blue autofluorescence under UV light (330–385 nm), using epifluorescence microscopy and also in living individuals under a UV lamp with excitation light of 365 nm. Some morphological cuticular structures expressed a more intense autofluorescence than other body parts. For this reason, only the cuticle was analyzed. The parameters of autofluorescence were investigated using spectroscopic methods (molecular spectroscopy in infrared, ultraviolet-visible, fluorescence, and X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy) in samples of two subspecies of M. graniger preserved in ethanol. Samples excited by UV light (from 350 to 380 nm) emitted blue light of wavelengths 419, 420, 441, 470 and 505 nm (solid phase) and 420, 435 and 463 (ethanol extract). The results showed that the autofluorescence observed from living individuals may be due to some β-carboline or coumarin derivatives, some crosslinking structures, dityrosine, or due to other compounds showing similar excitation-emission characteristics