| Abstract: | Determination of cellulosic and noncellulosic neutral sugars occurring in soil hydrolysates by means of high-performance thin-layer chromatography Analytical methods for soil samples are described, which allow the differentiation between monosaccharides bound in cellulosic and noncellulosic polysaccharides of the plant cell wall. The four step procedure includes hydrolysis of total polysaccharides (72 % H2SO4, 2N H2SO4), hydrolysis of the noncellulosic fraction (2N trifluoroacetic acid), separation of the monomers by high-performance thin-layer chromatography (HPTLC) and scanning of the plates for quantification. The amount of cellulose can be calculated by the difference of total glucose and glucose hydrolyzed by trifluoroacetic acid. Hydrolysis of soil samples by trifluoroacetic acid is a simple method for the determination of noncellulosic cell wall polysaccharides. Losses of sugars during the whole analytical procedure (hydrolysis, separation by HPTLC and quantification) are below 10 % for all sugars studied (galactose, glucose, mannose, arabinose, xylose). Standard deviations do not overstep this value, too. By HPTLC a large number of samples are chromatographed together; therefore, the total analysis time per sample is very short. As example the depth functions of hydrolyzed sugars in a Lithic Borofolist are discussed. |
