Isolation, Purification and Characterization of Non-cellulosic Water-soluble Polysaccharides: A Review

Nowadays, finding biopolymers with desirable properties for wide industrial applications is one of the important issues to research around the world. Polysaccharides are the biopolymers which have a variety of applications in different industries and in the field of medicine. Abundance, biodegradability, renewability and being natural make them appropriate materials to replace some of petroleum-based products and to be used for the applications requiring biocompatibility. Due to their structural variations in nature, polysaccharide's properties are immense. In order to explain and improve the properties, structural characterization of polysaccharides is necessary and is of interest for the researchers nowadays. Because of structural varieties of non-cellulosic water-soluble polysaccharides, identification of the polysaccharide's structure for finding their medical properties is also of importance in the research studies. The first step in structural characterization of water-soluble polysaccharide is to isolate and purify the polysaccharide, as various sources of polysaccharides made by plants, animals and bacteria have different impurities. Every non-polysaccharide material in the samples requires specific method to be isolated. Different method and tools exist to characterize the chemical structure of these biopolymers. This review introduces the common methods and tests used for isolation, purification and structural characterization of the water-soluble polysaccharides.