Degradation Products Of Ascorbic Acid Research Articles

QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE DETERMINATION OF THE WHEAT LEAF CARBOHYDRATES

The nonreducing sugar in wheat leaves is probably entirely sucrose. It is the only abundant sugar. Free reducing sugars are absent, or almost absent from wheat leaves grown under the conditions described. The reducing power in the cleared alcoholic extracts of the leaves is, at least, partly due to degradation products of ascorbic acid. Other nonsugar reducing substances also are apparently present. The alcohol insoluble residue from wheat leaves contains little or no fructosan, dextrin, or starch at the two and one-half week old stage. Satisfactory methods for extracting and determining the sucrose are described. The following methods gave satisfactory results with wheat leaf extracts: the reducing power methods of Hanes and Somogyi after acid or preferably invertase hydrolysis, Ost's solution for fructose residues, the method of Neuberg and Strauss, the colorimetric resorcinol method. The latter method gives only approximate values for fructose residues unless the sugar concentration is high; the method is then fairly reliable. The following methods did not give satisfactory results: Hanes and Somogyi methods for free reducing sugars initially present in the extract, the hypoiodite titration for aldose sugars, and Sieben's method for fructose determination.