Carbohydrate Analysis for the Food and Beverage Industry0 pages
carbohydrates
Carbohydrate Analysis
by IC and HPLC
High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) is an important
tool to identify and quantify carbohydrates in food and beverage samples,
providing key metrics of product quality
and related properties, contamination,
or adulteration. HPLC plays important
roles in quality control, nutritional
labeling, authenticity testing, and
production processes monitoring, for
example, tracking the fermentation of
alcoholic beverages.
Separation and detection in
high-concentration carbohydrate
mixtures, as found in the food and
beverage industry, are made challenging by the wide variety of carbohydrate
molecules and intricacy of carbohydrate
mixtures existing in nature. Selection
of the optimal HPLC approach depends
on the sample matrix, carbohydrate
concentration, selectivity, and sensitivity required.
HPLC on aminopropyl-bonded
silica or polymer-based metal-loaded
cation-exchange resins, in conjunction
with refractive index (RI) or lowwavelength UV detection, provide
simple isocratic methods. In most cases,
HPLC on metal-loaded cation-exchange
resins with RI detection (HPLC-RI) is
used to determine simple monoand disaccharides in the g/L range.
However, some sample matrices require
better resolution of sugars from sugar
alcohols, organic acids, and sodium
chloride.1
Passion. Power. Productivity.
High-performance anionexchange chromatography with pulsed
amperometric detection (HPAE-PAD)
and specialized CarboPac® columns
solve these chromatographic and
selectivity issues, while also
allowing the determination of alcohols,
glycols, and aldehydes. HPAE-PAD
can separate sugars, sugar alcohols,
oligo-, and polysaccharides with very
high resolution, without derivatization
or pre-concentration. This approach
provides quantification to picomolar
levels.2
Dionex offers HPLC-RI and
HPLC-PAD solutions optimized for a
wide variety of research and monitoring
applications.t