The present review assesses the potential of the Phaseolus vulgaris a-amylase inhibitor isoform 1 (a-AI1) starch blockers as a widely used remedy against obesity and diabetes. Consumption of the a-amylase inhibitor causes marginal intraluminal a-amylase activity facilitated by the inhibitor’s appropriate structural, physico-chemical and functional properties. As a result there is decreased post...

Storage of newly fixed carbon as starch and sucrose follows a regular daily pattern in exporting sugar beet leaves under constant day length and level of illumination. Up to the final two hours of the light period, when starch storage declines, a nearly constant proportion of newly fixed carbon was allocated to carbohydrate storage, principally starch. Sucrose is stored only early in the light ...

BACKGROUND & AIMS The factors that distinguish metabolically healthy obesity from metabolically unhealthy obesity are not well understood. Diet has been implicated as a determinant of the unhealthy obesity phenotype, but which aspects of the diet induce dysmetabolism are unknown. The goal of this study was to investigate whether specific macronutrients or macronutrient combinations provoke dysm...

Polymeric carbohydrates, starch and nonstarch polysaccharides (NSP), quantitatively represent the largest portion of the diets for pigs and are, therefore, the largest energy contributor. The 2 types of polysaccharides, however, have different fates and functions in the gastrointestinal tract and lead to different metabolites upon digestion. Pancreatic and mucosal enzymes in the small intestine...

Changes in the physicochemical properties of wheat, sago, tapioca and potato starches were studied after heating for 1 hour at 100oC, 110oC, and 120oC and for 2 hours at 120oC. These properties were characterised through the swelling behaviour of starch granules, amount of carbohydrate materials leached from the granules, starch paste retrogradation rate and gel strength. For all starches excep...

Seasonal non-structural carbohydrate (NSC) dynamics in different organs can indicate the strategies trees use to cope with water stress; however, these remain poorly understood along a large precipitation gradient. In this study, we hypothesized that correlation between availability and NSC concentrations might be strengthened by decreasing Pinus tabulaeformis Carr. forests temperate China. Our...

In this study, a novel α-amylase was cloned from Bifidobacterium longum and named BiLA. The enzyme exhibited optimal activity at 20 °C and a pH value of 5.0. Kinetic analysis using various carbohydrate substrates revealed that BiLA had the highest k(cat/)K(m) value for amylose. Interestingly, analysis of the enzymatic reaction products demonstrated that BiLA specifically catalyzed the hydrolysi...

This work concerns the degradation of starch to glucose by enzymes of Clostridium acetobutylicum, a stage in the butanol-acetone fermentation which has so far been little investigated. Previous workers have mainly used growing cultures of Cl. acetobutylicum, though Robinson (1922) showed that starch (and other carbohydrates) were fermented by toluene-treated cell suspensions. In the present wor...

We report that protein phosphorylation is involved in the control of starch metabolism in Arabidopsis leaves at night. sex4 (starch excess 4) mutants, which have strongly reduced rates of starch metabolism, lack a protein predicted to be a dual specificity protein phosphatase. We have shown that this protein is chloroplastic and can bind to glucans and have presented evidence that it acts to re...

The effect of cereal-based diets varying in dietary fibre (DF) on gastric emptying and glucose absorption over an isolated loop of jejunum was studied in four pigs fitted with two sets of re-entrant cannulas. The pigs were fed on either a wheat-flour diet or three diets based on oat flour (endosperm), rolled oats or oat bran containing different amounts of soluble DF. Mean transit time (MTT) of...