| Popis: |
Curcumin is a natural and biocompatible compound that has been used for a variety of medical applications. These applications include treatment of several tumor cells, skin diseases, wound healing, and inflammation. Moreover, curcumin has potential to be used for theranostic of neurodegenerative diseases involving formation of Aβ plaques, as it can stain amyloid-β (Aβ) plaques and slightly improve the cognitive function in elderly. However, the diagnosis contrast and the treatment efficiency curcumin can provide are dependent on its molecular microenvironment, as it can change curcumin physical and chemical properties. In this paper, we characterize these properties for two types of curcumin formulations and suggest a quantum yield approach to enhance the detection of Aβ plaques with one of these formulations. The first formulation is synthetic curcumin (100% curcumin) and the second is Sigma Aldrich curcumin has 94% of curcuminoid content and 80% curcumin. Our measurements show that solutions containing only curcumin provided highest fluorescence signal with relatively lower optical densities, i.e., an increase of 73.2% (375 nm excitation) and 55% (445 nm excitation) in the quantum yield for the concentration of 20 μg/ml (54.30 μM). This suggests the synthetic curcumin formulation may be more efficient when used as a biomarker for diagnostics purposes or monitoring the efficiency of curcumin treatments using fluorescence spectroscopy. |
