re: Martin's comments on ascorbate

OVARIAN ANTIOXIDANTS

        With regard to my antioxidant studies on 41 human FFs from IVF
patients. I found a median ascorbate concentration of 40 uM, with a range of
14-87 uM.  These are comparable to plasma literature values which are
normally about 30 uM to 111 uM (an extreme value).  Unfortunately we could
not compare them to patient serum values but interestingly, these values are
much lower than the concentration range you measured.  I'd welcome any
comments or ideas you may have, and am very interested in knowing a little
more about the spectrophotometric method you used. 
        I have also measured the corresponding dehydroascorbate
concentrations which gave a median value of 3.6 uM with a range of 0.7-17.7
uM.  I'm not sure how these compare to plasma values (any ideas anyone?) and
I still have to look at these results properly as they are 'HOT off the
HPLC'.  Just out of interest, I've also measured alpha-tocopherol which gave
a median value of 5 uM with a range of 4-12 uM, and beta-carotene levels
were <1 uM.
        As I mentioned before one of the things we are interested in, are
the effects of antioxidants on ovarian steroid hormone synthesis, so we will
be investigating ascorbate (and possibly dehydroascorbate) on
granulosa-lutein cells in the near future.

Thanks

Jenny