Professor Jens Ø. Duus, Department of Chemistry, Technical University Denmark

NMR in Carbohydrate Biotechnology, Structure and Conversion

The power of NMR as a tool in the development of carbohydrate biotechnology will be described with a series of examples.

Carbohydrates are central in many biotechnology industries ranging from the energy and carbon source in fermentations like beer brewing to the development of new functional oligosaccharides for as food ingredients.

The understanding of function and conversion of biomolecules starts by the description of the structure. The complexity of carbohydrates require the combination of multiple techniques primarily mass spectrometry and NMR. Here methods for NMR based elucidation of carbohydrates are shown using examples with high complexity.

Enzymatic conversion (hydrolysis or synthesis) of carbohydrates can be followed in real time using the NMR tube as a small reactor. It will be shown how this can be used to find new enzymatic activities useful for synthesis of disaccharides by transglycosylation.

In a more complex system it is demonstrated how DNP NMR allow for the real time monitoring of glucose uptake and metabolism in yeast. This has given new hereto unseen details about the metabolism in real time.