Honey is a natural food produced by bees and can be composed from various sources: from flower nectar or other secretions of living plant parts, or from various species of manna. Chemically, it is a complex mixture of many organic and inorganic compounds, such as sugars, proteins, amino acids, enzymes, vitamins, organic acids, water, minerals and polyphenols. In my thesis, I used spectrophotometric analysis and liquid chromatography to study the content of fluorescent compounds in honey, i. e. compounds that, when relaxing from excited states, emit photons of lower energies or emit light at longer wavelengths. Honey is known to contain many fluorophores, such as polyphenols, vitamins and amino acids. I analyzed 5 species of honey of different botanical origin, 3 samples of each species, which I had to be properly prepare first. I used HPLC with UV and fluorescence detection and then interpreted the results.
With UV detection, I detected the least number of compounds, both in terms of concentration and number, in acacia and chestnut honey, while in forest honey, there were fewer chromatographic peaks, but they had relatively large areas. Using a fluorescent detector, I detected the smallest areas of chromatographic peaks in acacia, flower and lime honey. Both UV and FL analysis showed that all three samples of chestnut honey had a similar composition. Using standards, I was able to identify L-tyrosine, which was present in all honey samples, and riboflavin, which was present in two of the three samples of lime honey.
|
