The concentrations of essential oil evaluated were: 0, 25, 50, 100, 150, 200 and 250 μg/mL. The antioxidant activity was expressed as inhibition percentage with reference to the control after a 60 min incubation using the following equation: %AA = 100 [1 − (Ai − At)/Ac − Act)], where %AA = antioxidant activity; Ai = sample absorbance at time 0; At = sample absorbance at PF-02341066 in vivo 60 min; Ac = absorbance of control at time 0; Act = absorbance

of control at 60 min. The hydrogen atom or electron donation ability of the savory essential oil and the timol pure compound (reference) were measured from the bleaching of purple-colored ethanol solution of DPPH. This spectrophotometric assay uses the stable radical 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) as a reagent (Amarowicz, Pegg, Rahimi-Moghaddam, Barl, & Weil, 2004). An aliquot of the sample (100 μl) was mixed with 1.4 ml of ethanol and then added to 1 ml of 0.004% DPPH (Sigma–Aldrich) in ethanol. The mixture was shaken vigorously and then immediately placed in a UV–vis spectrophotometer (UV – 1601PC Shimadzu) to monitor the decrease in absorbance at 517 nm. Monitoring was continued for 60 min until the reaction reached a plateau. The radical-scavenging activities of samples, expressed as percentage inhibition of DPPH, were calculated according

Mitomycin C to the formula: Antioxidant activity %AA = 100 − [(As × 100)/Ac] where As and Ac are the absorbance values of the sample and of the control checked after 60 min, respectively. The effect of S. montana L. EO on lipid oxidation in the sausages was evaluated using a spectrophotometer (Cary, Varian) and the 2-thiobarbituric

acid (TBA) extraction method described by Raharjo, Sofos, and Schmidt (1992). Ten-gram portions of sausages were combined with 40 ml of 5% trichloroacetic acid (TCA) and 1 ml of 0.15% antioxidant BHT (Sigma–Aldrich) and homogenized for 5 min. The homogenate Progesterone was filtered through Whatman No. 1 filter paper, and 2 ml of filtrate was combined with 2 ml of 0.08 mol/l TBA reagent and heated in boiling water (100 ± 5 °C) for 5 min. The absorbance of the resulting solution was measured at 531 nm, and the TBARS values were expressed as mg of malondialdehyde (MDA) per kg sample, calculated using 1,1,3,3-tetraethoxypropane (TEP) as the standard. Treatments were arranged in split-plot factorial designs, with EO concentrations (0.00, 7.80, 15.60 and 31.25 μl/g) and nitrite levels (0, 100 and 200 mg/kg) as plots and times of storage (1, 10, 20 and 30 days) as subplots. The whole experiment was conducted in three independent batches, and the collected data were subjected to analysis of variance (ANOVA) to verify the interactions between the effects. The differences among the treatments at each day of storage were also determined by ANOVA, and the means were compared with a Scott–Knott test, adopting a 5% significance level. The statistical analyses, plots and regression plots were performed using Statistical R® software (2010).