A variety of organic chemical\u00a0analytical\u00a0techniques are generally applicable to studies involving carbohydrates. Optical rotation, for example, once was frequently used to characterize carbohydrates. The ability to measure the rotation of the plane of polarized\u00a0light\u00a0transmitted through a solution containing a carbohydrate depends on finding a suitable solvent; water usually is used, with light at a\u00a0wavelength\u00a0of 589 m\u03bc (millimicrons). Optical rotation is no longer widely used to characterize monosaccharides. The magnitude\u00a0and sign\u00a0of the\u00a0optical rotation\u00a0of glycosides, however, is useful in assigning\u00a0configuration\u00a0(\u03b1 or \u03b2) to the\u00a0hydroxyl group\u00a0at the anomeric centre; glycosides of the \u03b1-configuration generally have rotations of higher magnitude than do the same glycosides of the \u03b2-configuration. Optical rotation is not a completely\u00a0additive\u00a0property; a trisaccharide composed of three\u00a0glucose\u00a0residues, for example, does not have a rotation three times that of one glucose molecule. Sugar alcohols cannot form ring structures; their rotation\u00a0values\u00a0are extremely small, suggesting a relationship between ring structure and the ability of a carbohydrate to rotate the plane of polarized light. Certain types of reactions (e.g.,\u00a0glycoside\u00a0hydrolysis) can be monitored by measuring the change in optical rotation as a function of time. This technique is frequently used to examine the breakdown of disaccharides or oligosaccharides to monosaccharide units, especially if a large change in the net optical rotation may be expected, as occurs in the\u00a0hydrolysis\u00a0of\u00a0sucrose.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A variety of organic chemical\u00a0analytical\u00a0techniques are generally applicable to studies involving carbohydrates. Optical rotation, for example, once was frequently used to characterize carbohydrates. The ability to measure the rotation of the plane of polarized\u00a0light\u00a0transmitted through a solution containing a carbohydrate depends on finding a suitable solvent; water usually is used, with light at a\u00a0wavelength\u00a0of 589 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-carbohydrates"],"Cooking_time":"","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cake.appscodestudio.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cake.appscodestudio.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cake.appscodestudio.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cake.appscodestudio.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cake.appscodestudio.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1771"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cake.appscodestudio.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1772,"href":"https:\/\/cake.appscodestudio.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1771\/revisions\/1772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cake.appscodestudio.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cake.appscodestudio.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cake.appscodestudio.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}