Long delays between the harvesting and crushing of sugarcane and the associated deterioration of cane quality have long been recognised as a major source of loss to the sugar industry. Different methods of reducing harvest-to-crush delays need to be evaluated without expensive and time consuming experimentation on real world harvesting and delivery systems. A joint project between the Agricultu...

Herein, I describe pyridylamination for versatile analysis of sugar chains. The reducing ends of the sugar chains are tagged with 2-aminopyridine and the resultant chemically stable fluorescent derivatives are used for structural/functional analysis. Pyridylamination is an effective "operating system" for increasing sensitivity and simplifying the analytical procedures including mass spectromet...