The relationship of specific optical rotation to structural composition for Acacia and related gums

This paper proposes that the specific optical rotation of a polysaccharide exudate gum is a linear function of the carbohydrate composition, and a classification system is developed based on this functional relationship. In empirical terms this means that exudate gums of a particular species and genus can be represented by a formula, called the Rotation Operator that is a sequence of numbers. Optimised rotation operators can be derived from chemical data by an algorithm based on the method of least squares and used to identify an unknown gum. Identification of individual gums as well as clustering by this method is demonstrated by application to 50 Acacia gum samples collected for an FAO Project.