Development of a method to quantify sucrose in soybean grains

The sucrose content of soybean seeds affects the final flavor of soy-derived products. The aim of this work was to develop a simple, low-cost, spectrophotometric method for sucrose quantification in soybean seeds. To achieve this goal, we combined the action of invertase, an enzyme that hydrolyses sucrose into fructose and glucose, with glucose oxidase, an enzyme widely used for glucose quantification. This system was adapted to ELISA plates, making large-scale analyses possible at low cost, with potential application in routine analyses. To validate this method, sucrose content was determined in seeds of 14 soybean cultivars by this new method, as well as by HPLC and the enzymatic method of Stitt. The correlation coefficients were high and significant between the results obtained with the new method and the HPLC method (r = 0.9766) and the Stiff method (0.9461).