The Range of DSHO Application in Experiments with Pigments of Plants and Animals

Abstract

Over a number of years our interests have been concerned with the study of transformations of carbon-labeled or hydrogen-labeled carotene and basic xanthophylls in plant cells. This interest was caused because the hypothesis that light induces the direct reduction of violaxanthin (5,6,5′,6′-diepoxy-5,5′,6,6′-tetrahydro-β-carotene-3,3′-diol) into lutein (3,3′-dihydroxy-α-carotene, β,ε-carotene-3,3″-diol) without intermediate products (Sapozhnikov et al. 1957, 1959; Bazhanova and Sapozhnikov 1963) was not methodologically based. It is paradoxical, but this supposition already had opponents before publication (Moster and Quackenbush 1952a, b; Cholnoky et al. 1956, 1957, 1958) and still more afterwards (Anderson et al. 1960; Blass et al. 1959) because the stated theoretical concepts of Sapozhnikov and coworkers were neither persuasive nor the only possible alternative. The opinions existing on this question are described in the review by Saakov and Konovalov (1966).