Pyrolysis of Disaccharides Using a Curie-Point Pyrolyzer

A Curie-point pyrolyzer directly coupled to a capillary gas chromatograph was applied to analyze the pyrolytic behavior of a series of disaccharides with different stereo- and configurational-structures such as maltose, cellobiose, isomaltose, lactose, lactulose, sucrose, and trehalose. Application of simultaneous pyrolysis and methylation to the experiments enables us to obtain characteristic pyrograms of non-reducing disaccharides as compared to those of reducing disaccharides in particular, with different fine peaks depending on the molecular structures. Assignments of the fine peaks of the non-reducing disaccharides were attained by comparing the pyrograms thus obtained with the chromatograms of the methylated same disaccharides obtained by usual capillary-type gas chromatography.