**2. Materials and methods**

In this paper, we present the results of our experiments on the interaction of different carotenoids and lipids *in vitro*, *ex vivo* and *in vivo.* In these experiments, we tested the representatives of two main groups of carotenoids: highly hydrophobic carotenes—lycopene and β-carotene, and less hydrophobic ones, containing oxygen xanthophylls—lutein, zeaxanthin and astaxanthin. Since in most of the experiments interaction of different carotenoids and different lipids led, in principle, to similar patterns or trends, and due to the limitation of the space in this paper, we present here as an example only representative data from each set of undertaken experiments.
