Analysis of carbohydrates in wood and pulps employing enzymatic hydrolysis and subsequent capillary zone electrophoresis

An efficient method for determining the carbohydrate composition of extractive-free delignified wood and pulp is described here. The polysaccharides in the sample are first hydrolyzed using a mixture of commercially available preparations of cellulase and hemicellulase. The reducing saccharides in the hydrolysate thus obtained are subsequently derivatized with 4-aminobenzoic acid ethyl ester and thereafter quantitated by capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) in an alkaline borate buffer with monitoring of the absorption at 306 nm. All reducing sugars (i.e., neutral monosaccharides and uronic acids) which occur as structural elements in the polysaccharides of wood and pulp can be quantitated in a single such analytical run, which can also determine the contents of 4-deoxy-β-l-threo-hex-4-enopyranosyluronic acid (HexA) residues present in pulps obtained from alkaline processes. CZE analyses were performed using linear regression of standard curves over a concentration range spanning approximately three orders of magnitude. Carbohydrate constituents constituting approximately 0.1% of the dry mass of the sample could be quantitated. The overall precision of this analytical procedure – involving enzymatic hydrolysis, derivatization and CZE – was good (RSD=2.2–7.5%), especially considering the heterogeneity of the wood and pulp samples. The total yield of carbohydrates (93–97%) obtained employing the procedure developed here was consistently higher than that obtained upon applying the traditional procedure for carbohydrate analysis (85–93%) (involving acid hydrolysis and gas chromatographic analysis) to the same pulps. The trisaccharide HexA-xylobiose was the only HexA-containing saccharide detected using the conditions for enzymatic hydrolysis developed here (i.e., 30 h incubation at pH 4 and 40°C); whereas mixtures of HexA-xylobiose and HexA-xylotriose were obtained when the incubation was performed at pH 5 or 6.