Cerium binding activity of three different water soluble pectin compounds of different origin was studied in a batch sorption system. The Langmuir, Freundlich and BET sorption models were adopted to describe the binding reactions between metal ions and pectin molecules. The Langmuir model provided the best fit. Within the pH range from 4.0 to 6.0, the largest amount of the cerium ions was bound...

The natural pectins are believed to consist of long, open, unbranched chains of galacturonic acid with an occasional arabinose and galactose molecule. The free carboxyl groups of the galacturonic acid are partially or wholly esterified with methyl alcohol, and an occasional hydroxyl group is esterified with acetic acid [BONNER (4), BRANFOOT (5), FREUDENBERG (7), GADDUM (8), KERTESZ (13), MYERS ...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Many fruits soften during ripening, which is important commercially and in rendering the fruit attractive to seed-dispersing animals. Cell-wall polysaccharide hydrolases may contribute to softening, but sometimes appear to be absent. An alternative hypothesis is that hydroxyl radicals ((•)OH) non-enzymically cleave wall polysaccharides. We evaluated this hypothesis by using ...

Jute, Corchorus capsularis, is the most important cash crop of Pakistan. Most of the foreign exchange earned comes from the export of jute. For this reason jute is popularly called the "golden fiber" of Pakistan. A very importanit step in the jute industry is retting. During this process, some microorganisms decompose pectins of jute bark and the intervening tissues disintegrate. The pectins ar...

Several reviews of pectin as a soluble fiber have included unreliable tables of pectin content for fruits and vegetables. Values given for ranges of pectin content in the fresh, edible portion are actually presented in original reports variously as peel pectin content, dry weight values, soluble rather than total pectins, and some values have been for unripe fruit. This has resulted in reportin...

Department of Biological Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia V5A 1S6, Canada (K.M., A.R.K.); Department of Botany, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z4, Canada (G.L.-T., G.H.); Institute of Botany, University of Basel, 4056 Basel, Switzerland (S.B.); Institute for Biology II, Botany/Plant Physiology, Albert-Ludwigs-University, D–79104 Frei...

The polysaccharide structure and dynamics in the primary cell wall of the model grass Brachypodium distachyon are investigated for the first time using solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). While both grass and non-grass cell walls contain cellulose as the main structural scaffold, the former contains xylan with arabinose and glucuronic acid substitutions as the main hemicellulose, with...