What is it about?
This work reports on an extension to a protocol previously published by Ainsworth & Gillespie (2007) designed to quantify total phenolics in plant tissues using the Folin-Ciocalteu assay. We have modified the existing protocol to expand its applications by combining it with two other microplate-adapted assays that quantify total tannins (Makkar et al. 2007), total flavonoids (Marinova et al. 2005). The resulting protocol was implemented in a study aimed to describe the variation of foliar secondary metabolites in trees growing in a tropical dry forest ecosystem and to explore the ecological and environmental factors associated with such variation.
Featured Image
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Our enhanced protocols fulfill the current requirements for fast, accurate, inexpensive, small-scale, low waste assays for quantifying plant secondary metabolites required in the ever-growing number of phytochemical studies at the community or ecosystem levels.
Perspectives
Our objective is to facilitate the characterization of the vegetation through the quantification of hard traits – rare in literature due to the difficulty to quantify them –. Although complex to measure, such informative traits allow us to understand important aspects of their response to natural and anthropogenic disturbance such as the assembly and disassembly of plant communities, the mechanisms underlying the distribution of species in anthropic landscapes, the relationship between functional diversity and ecosystem services and the degree of resilience of ecosystems.
Angel E Bravo-Monzón
Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Small-Scale Determination of Total Phenols, Tannins, and Flavonoids from Foliar Tissue Using Colorimetric Assays, February 2022, Research Square,
DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.pex-1234/v1.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
