Hydrogen bonds and structure of carbohydrates

Abstract

Carbohydrates, one of the most important classes of organic compounds, are of special interest for chemistry, biology, medicine, technology, industry, wholesale products and foodstuffs. The most widely distributed polysaccharide in nature, cellulose, which is found in vegetable tissues, cotton, flax, etc., is a valuable raw material for obtaining artificial fibres, films, plastics, paper, lacquers and so on. The diversity of steric properties of molecules of carbohydrates (with the same chemical composition) makes possible their unique non-valence intramolecular and intermolecular interactions. Since carbohydrates contain a large number of highly polar hydroxyl groups, a special role in the system of these interactions is played by intramolecular and intermolecular hydrogen bonds. The hydrogen bonds are of prime importance in stabilizing the conformations of molecules of carbohydrates and their fragments, in forming various structural formations and in the processes of orientation, crystallization and ordering of supermolecular formations. The investigation of hydrogen bonds is a fundamental scientific problem in the physics and chemistry of carbohydrates and is of great practical importance. Such investigations have been carried out for a long time at the B.I. Stepanov Institute of Physics. The researchers have successfully used the methods (which are effective in investigating the intramolecular and intermolecular interactions) of molecular spectroscopy and molecular mechanics, mathematical treatment of complex spectral bands, and theoretical calculation of vibrational spectra with regard to intermolecular