[Significance of byssochlamic acid in fruit juice mold]

The authors describe a method for the determination of byssochlamic acid in fruit juice. After extraction and purification, byssochlamic acid is separated by thin-layer chromatography on HF 254 silica gel. The quenching of fluorescence of byssochlamic acid is estimated quantitatively on the plate by means of the thin-layer attachment of a fluorescence spectrophotometer using reference substances. For fruit juices the recovery rate is 80%; the limit of detection lies at 0.5 p.p.m. Byssochlamic acid could not be detected in commercially-available fruit juice and neither in juices produced of fruits which had spontaneously got mouldy.