A Novel Standardized Oxygen Radical Absorbance Assay for Evaluating Antioxidant Natural Products

Functional and quantitative evaluation of analytes in crude extracts or semipure mixtures has been considered challenging due to variation in generated results. Some of the drawbacks have been linked to the texture, form, and content of the samples. The crude extracts contain multiple components and, in oxygen radical absorbance capacity (ORAC) assays, have exhibited complex reaction kinetics due to interference or matrix effect. The conventional ORAC assay utilized a single dilution factor that brought about a wide CV difference (60-110%) in antioxidant activity for each extract compared to other dilution factors applied. Due to precision errors introduced from these extremely high CV% differences, determination of antioxidant capacity based on a single dilution may introduce discrepant results. A novel standardized ORAC (SORAC) assay for the determination of antioxidant capacity of dietary plant extracts is described in this study. Using the SORAC assay, positive linear correlations (R-2 = 0.95-0.99) were obtained for the sample extracts tested when a multiple dilution strategy was applied. Thus, on the strength of our observations, SORAC has been proposed as an effective tool for assessing antioxidant analytes in a biological matrix. This technique could also be modified for use in other bioanalytical platforms concerned with the analytes matrix effect.