ABSTRACT
The earliest studies on carotenes date back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1831, the German Wackenroder, an analytical chemist, isolated the pigment yellow/orange from carrots and named it “carotin.” After almost one century, in 1907, Willstatter and Mieg established the empirical formula of carotene as composed by 40 carbon atoms and 56 hydrogen atoms. Twelve years later, a relationship between the yellow pigments found in plants and vitamin A was suggested by Steenbock. The structure of the molecule of β-carotene was ‚rst established in 1931 by the Suisse organic chemist Paul Karrer, who received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1937 for work concerning β-carotene and vitamin A.
