Starch granules double helical structures

Figure 4.3 The building block structure of potato amylopectin clusters. Branched building blocks (encircled) are mainly found inside amorphous lamellae (A) of semi-crystalline rings in starch granules. Double helices (symbolized as cylinders) extend from the building blocks into the crystalline lamellae (C). Enlargements of a double helix segment, in which the single strands are parallel and left-handed, and a building block are shown to the right.

X-ray diffraction studies support the double-helical structure but suggest a parallel orientation of the amylose chains.81 Since amylose has not been obtained as single crystals the diffraction data do not give a definitive answer. However, if double helices are formed by adjacent branches in amylopectin and glycogen the two strands would be parallel. Starch granules also contain amorphous starch which appears to contain single helices, possibly wrapped around lipid materials.82... 

Amylopectin is responsible for the crystalline character of the starch granule and its structure can be modelled as a hyperbranched molecule [10,11, 28,29]. The model for the amylopectin molecule proposed by Robin [14] is illustrated in Figure 4.1(c). The A-chains, which are short segments of 15 D-glucopyranosyl residues, are the portion responsible for the crystalline structure of amylopectin. Starch crystallites are thus formed by compact areas made up of A-chains with DP 15. The crystallinity index of regular corn starch with 73% amylose is equivalent to that of waxy maize starch which is 100% amylose this confirms that amylose content has little effect on granule crystallinity. Starch crystallites formed in compact areas are made up of vicinal A-chains in a compact double helix conformation with two extended helices possessing 6 residues per turn that repeat every 21 A [1]. 

Figure 20-3 Proposed structure of a molecule of amylopec-tin in a starch granule. The highly branched molecule lies within 9 nm thick layers, about 2 / 3 of which contains parallel double helices of the kind shown in Fig. 4-8 in a semicrystalline array. The branches are concentrated in the amorphous region.113 114 121 Some starch granules contain no amylose, hut it may constitute up to 30% by weight of the starch. It may he found in part in the amorphous bands and in part intertwined with the amylopectin.122...

Starch. Starch is a polyglucan mixture, containing the linear amylose (about 25%) and the very large, heavily branched amylopectin. Native starch granules are virtually insoluble in water, mainly because part of the amylopectin is crystalline. The crystals consist of stacks of double helices, which stacks are arranged in a complex supermolecular structure. 

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