Czech J. Food Sci., 2004, 22(10):S64-S67 | DOI: 10.17221/10613-CJFS
Phenolic compounds as cross-links of plant derived polysaccharides
- 1 Institute of Biochemistry and Food Chemistry, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
- 2 US Dairy Forage Research Center, USDA-Agricultural Research Service, Madison, USA
Plant cell wall polysaccharides are partially cross-linked via phenolic compounds. As shown in the past, the most important phenolic compounds to cross-link plant cell-wall polysaccharides are ester-linked ferulic acid dimers, but p-coumarate dimers were also shown to be potential cross-linking compounds. Recently, ferulic acid dimers were identified and quantified in a range of cereal grains. The isolation of 8-O-4-dehydrodiferulic aciddiarabinoside from maize bran shows that diferulic acids are able to form intermolecular cross-links between arabinoxylans. The more recently identified sinapic acid dehydrodimers and ferulic acid dehydrotrimers provide additional contributions to building up a strong network of plant cell wall polysaccharides.
Keywords: plant cell walls; arabinoxylans; ferulic acid; ferulate dimers and trimers; sinapate dimers
Published: December 31, 2004 Show citation
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY NC 4.0), which permits non-comercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original publication is properly cited. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.