Comparison of three different methods for trehalose determination in yeast extracts

Trehalose is a disaccharide widely distributed in nature with great potential for application in different fields. Determination of trehalose has been carried out for many years using the anthrone colorimetric method, which may be subject to interferents. Alternatives to this problem seem to be the use of HPLC techniques or specific enzymatic assays. In the present work, a simple normal-HPLC procedure was applied to the analysis of different yeast extract samples and the results compared either to the conventional anthrone method or by an enzymatic assay based on the cleavage of trehalose by trehalase. Each method showed correlations over 0.97 with the others; however, only HPLC and the enzymatic method were statistically identical ( p < 0.05). In addition, the HPLC method showed good linearity ( r = 0.995) and recovery (98%), producing trehalose results in the range of 8.3–83 mg g −1 of cells. The results showed that in some cases the anthrone method may in fact produce inflated results although presenting consistency within the set of data.