Abstract
Oligofructans are functional food ingredients with a great potential to improve the quality of food. They are used as low calory sweeteners and as prebiotics, they e.g. stimulate growth of Bifidobacteria in the gastrointestinal tract or enhance calcium absorption [1]. Oligofructans mainly consist of β(2→1) linked fructose units [2]. A starting glucose moiety normally is present, but may be lost during processing. There are different methods for separation and characterisation concerning the degree of polymerisation (DP) like HPLC, GLC, high performance anion exchange chromatography with pulsed amperometric detection (HPAEC-PAD) and SEC [3]. The methods often require derivatisation, expensive equipment or are time consuming. Therefore the aim of this work was to develop a cheap and feasible method for the separation of oligofructans. Oligofructans show different solubility in acetonitrile-water mixtures depending on their DP. With increasing proportion of acetonitrile, the solubility of oligofructans with higher DP decreases. Thus, commercially available fructan preparations containing oligo- and polysaccharides with a wide range of DP were used for controlled precipitation with acetonitrile-water mixtures to obtain oligofructan preparations. With these oligofructans good separation up to DP of approximately 15 could be achieved by HPLC on a Luna Amino 5µm NH2 100A 250×4.6mm column (Phenomenex), RI-detection and a mobile phase mixture of 62% acetonitrile and 38% water. This method allows reproducible analysis within 30 minutes.
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