Quantification of amorphous content in starch granules

Starch has always been an important ingredient in human food, but increasingly it is being used for nonfood purposes. The amorphous content of starch granules is one of the major factors controlling food processing conditions and accounting for the quality of end products such as starchy foods and biodegradable plastics. However, the amorphous content of starch granules is usually estimated in an indirect fashion, by means of the determination of the degree of crystallinity. Here we show that due to the increased sensitivity of differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) at high scanning rates, (sometimes known as Hyper DSC), we can apply a direct method to quantify the amorphous content in waxy maize starch. These results show that Hyper-DSC has potential as a rapid and reliable technique to quantify the amorphous content of starch.