Carbohydrates / Polysaccharides - Structure elucidation - Sugar composition analysis

8 important questions on Carbohydrates / Polysaccharides - Structure elucidation - Sugar composition analysis

How can you hydrolyse a neutral and water soluble polysacharde?

2m TFA, 1h at 120 degrees

TFA is a acid that is volitile so it easy to use. If you wand to get rit of it you just let it stand and it will be gone in no time.

How does sugar composition analysis go?

  1. Converting polysaccharides into a mixture of monosaccharides by acid hydrolysis
  2. Analyze monosaccharides by:
    • Gas chromatography
    • HPLC
    • Uronic acids analyzed by color assay or by HPAEC after methanolysis

Is a alfa or beta linkage storonger and
is a pyranose or furanose stornger and
is a soluble or insoluble polysacharide?

beta is stronger
pyranose is stronger
insoluble is stronger (harder to hydroyse)
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Will a galactose rhamnose or a rhamnose galactose be more strong?

When the C1 of galactose is bound to the rhamnose it will be stronger then then the C1 of rhamnose is bound to the galactose. This is because a 6 ring is stronger then a 5 ring.

How can you hydrolyse uronic acid cotntaining materials?

Methanolysis stabilizes the released monomers. Prevens that a extra OH group is added because there is no water. This protects your sugars form further damage form acids.
2M HCL in mehtanol for 16 hours at 80 degrees

How does do a high performance anion-exchange chromatography (HPAEC) for a sugar?

You add very alkaline conditions which will load all the OH groups to O-. You can now determine what you have by looking at the calcitration curve you made.

How can you hydrolyse a fibrous material?

12M H2SO4 for 1 hour at 30 degrees
folowed by 1 MH2SO4 for 3 hours at 100 degrees. 

Lot of salt is added. This is not always plesen for analysis.

After complete hydrolysis, the obtained monosaccharides can be analyzed by GC or HPLC, what are the limitations and advantages?

GC:
  • Components must be volatile -> monosaccharides should be made volatile. (mono-sugars are reduced to their corresponding alditols, + acetylation step)
  • Preparation is fast compared to HPLC


HPAEC:
  • neutral sugars are negatively charged under alkaline condition
  • Hydrolysis can be checked in 1 run
  • Sample preparation is easy
  • Analysis time is fast
  • Pulsed amperometric detector (PAD) enables separation and quantification of monosaccharides with low detection limits

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