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In an alkaline solution, a reducing sugar forms some aldehyde or ketone, which allows it to act as a reducing agent, for example in Benedict's reagent. In such a reaction, the sugar becomes a carboxylic acid. All monosaccharides are reducing sugars, along with some disaccharides, some oligosaccharides, and some polysaccharides.
Monosaccharides (from Greek monos: single, sacchar: sugar), also called simple sugars, are the simplest forms of sugar and the most basic units from which all carbohydrates are built. Chemically, monosaccharides are polyhydroxy aldehydes with the formula H-[CHOH] n-CHO or polyhydroxy ketones with the formula H-[CHOH] m-CO-[CHOH]
All monosaccharide ketoses are reducing sugars, because they can tautomerize into aldoses via an enediol intermediate, and the resulting aldehyde group can be oxidised, for example in the Tollens' test or Benedict's test. [3] Ketoses that are bound into glycosides, for example in the case of the fructose moiety of sucrose, are nonreducing ...
Reducing disaccharides, in which one monosaccharide, the reducing sugar of the pair, still has a free hemiacetal unit that can perform as a reducing aldehyde group; lactose, maltose and cellobiose are examples of reducing disaccharides, each with one hemiacetal unit, the other occupied by the glycosidic bond, which prevents it from acting as a ...
Sucrose (table sugar) contains two sugars (fructose and glucose) joined by their glycosidic bond in such a way as to prevent the glucose undergoing isomerization to an aldehyde, or fructose to alpha-hydroxy-ketone form. Sucrose is thus a non-reducing sugar which does not react with Benedict's reagent.
Osazone formation was developed by Emil Fischer, [3] who used the reaction as a test to identify monosaccharides. The formation of a pair of hydrazone functionalities involves both oxidation and condensation reactions. [4] Since the reaction requires a free carbonyl group, only "reducing sugars" participate.
An oligosaccharide has both a reducing and a non-reducing end. The reducing end of an oligosaccharide is the monosaccharide residue with hemiacetal functionality, thereby capable of reducing the Tollens’ reagent, while the non-reducing end is the monosaccharide residue in acetal form, thus incapable of reducing the Tollens’ reagent. [2]
In solution, reducing monosaccharides exist in equilibrium between their acyclic and cyclic forms with less than 1% in the acyclic form. The open chain form can close to give the pyranose and furanose with both the α- and β-anomers present for each. The equilibrium population of conformers depends on their relative energies which can be ...