A Novel Spectrophotometric Assay for Superoxide Radical Anion Quantification

摘要

Nitro Blue Tetrazolium(NBT)is a widely used chemical for the determination of superoxide anion radicals(O2-)and superoxide dismutase activity in many fundamental processes.Its reduction reaction with superoxide was explored in this paper as well as the spectrometric characteristics of its reduction products such as monoformazan and diformazan.The molar extinction coefficients of these products in DMSO have been calculated as 120,000 and 235,000 M-1 cm-1,respectively.We propose that this method can be used to determine superoxide anion radical concentration or as a general screening protocol for the efficacy of an antioxidant.