Abstract
PEAT and his collaborators1–3 have found that amylose prepared from potato, sago, maize and tapioca starch cannot be degraded by purified β-amylase or phosphorylase to an extent greater than about 70 per cent. Retrogradation of the amylose, which might have accounted for this, has been ruled out2, leaving the implication that a proportion of the molecules of amylose have either an anomalous non-reducing end-group, or an anomalous group at some point along the chain. Peat, Thomas and Whelan4,5 find that the anomaly can be removed by treating amylose with a β-glucosidase, termed Z-enzyme, and therefore suggest that it may result from the presence of a single glucose residue attached to the main chain by a link of β-configuration.
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BAUM, H., GILBERT, G. & SCOTT, N. Oxidation as a Source of ‘Anomalies’ in Amylose. Nature 177, 889 (1956). https://doi.org/10.1038/177889a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/177889a0
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