Antiradical Activity
Radical scavenging activity (RSA) varied considerably among accessions. In general, RSA was relatively low and
only in seven accessions exceeded 10 % of free radical neutralization (Table 1). High antiradical activity (about 50 %
of DPPH• scavenging) was observed for purple root extracts. The RSA values for purple roots remained underestimated as tissue concentration in the extract was two times lower than in extracts from roots of other colors. High antiradical activity of purple-yellow and purple-orange carrots was previously reported by Sun et al. [3], who measured such activity by DPPH and ABTS methods. Also Gajewski et al. [32] found higher antioxidant capacity in methanolic extracts from
purple carrots than in extracts from orange and yellow
carrots. In the present work, orange, white and yellow
roots exhibited RSA, on average, at 6 % level and only
red roots had higher activity (9.3 %) (Table 2). Only
Yen et al. [31] observed very high, reaching even 80–
98 % of DPPH• neutralization activity in red carrot
roots; however, those authors used very high (2–
20 mg DM cm−3 of extract) tissue concentration.
Antiradical activity depended on the content of phenolic
compounds. Very high correlation (r>0.95) was found