Quercetin

This is a short article that will be expanded as time goes on. For the time being I just wanted to get this out there.

At some point several months ago I stumbled across a “new” developing agent called Quercetin, as far I can tell, I am the first person to use this as a film developing agent.

Basically what I was doing at the time was trying to extract sulphur compounds from onions, of course one thing led to another and I got the bright idea to look at the effect my extract had on film, low and behold the film started rapidly darkening. I tracked it down to mainly quercetin, which is in quite large quantities in some varieties of onions (red).

During my research (googling) of this compound, I found some interesting things out, it is stated for one, that in Quercetin increases Vitamin C absoprtion in the human body. A recent study (http://alzheimers-review.blogspot.com/2011/05/eating-fresh-apples-may-protect-from.html) states that Quercetin is proven to be a more powerful anti-oxidant than even Vitamin C.

It appears to behave oddly in different situations, I need to explore it’s effect on more pictorial scenes and in different compositions with other developing agents to see what it’s properties appear to be, but so far it appears to have very interesting properties.

Below shows the chemical structure of Quercetin.

The Structure of Quercetin