describe the general structure of carbohydrates
Answers
What are Carbohydrates?
It is a group of organic compounds occurring in living tissues and foods in the form of starch, cellulose, and sugars. The ratio of oxygen and hydrogen in carbohydrates is the same as in water i.e. 2:1. It typically breaks down in the animal body to release energy.
Cn(H2O)n is the generic formula for all carbohydrates. This formula is only valid for simple sugars, which are made up of the same amount of carbon and water.
Originally the term carbohydrate was used to describe compounds that were literally “carbohydrates,” because they had the empirical formula CH2O. Carbohydrates have been classified in recent years on the basis of carbohydrate structures, not their formulae. Such aldehydes and ketones are now known as polyhydroxy. Cellulose, starch, glycogen are amongst the compounds that belong to this family.
What is the General Formula of Carbohydrates?
The general formula for carbohydrates is Cx(H2O)y.
Carbohydrates (or sugars) were originally believed to be “hydrates of carbon,” because they have the general formula Cx(H2O)y.
Definition of Carbohydrates in Chemistry.
Chemically, carbohydrates are defined as “optically active polyhydroxy aldehydes or ketones or the compounds which produce units of such type on hydrolysis”.
The substance most people refer to as “sugar” is the sucrose disaccharide, which is extracted either from sugar cane or beets. Sucrose is the disaccharides most sweet. It’s approximately three times sweet as maltose, and six times sweet as lactose.
In recent years, in many consumer products, sucrose has been replaced with corn syrup, which is obtained when the polysaccharides in cornstarch are broken down. Corn syrup is primarily glucose, which is as sweet as sucrose only about 70 per cent.
Carbohydrates are also called saccharides which is a Greek word and it means sugar because almost all the carbohydrates have a sweet taste.
Carbohydrates Structure
Historically carbohydrates were defined as substances with the empirical formula Cn(H2O)m. The common sugars such as glucose and fructose or sucrose fit this formula, but nowadays the convention is to regard as a carbohydrate a polyhydroxy aldehydes or polyhydroxy ketone with the classical formula, a molecule closely related to it, or oligomers or polymers of such molecules. Their study evolved as a separate sub discipline within organic chemistry for practical reasons – they are water soluble and difficult to crystallise so that their manipulation demanded different sets of skills from classical “natural products” such as terpenes, steroids, alkaloids, etc.
The term “monosaccharide” refers to a carbohydrate derivative possessing a single carbon chain; “disaccharide” and “trisaccharide” refer to molecules containing two or three such monosaccharide units joined together by acetal or ketal linkages. “Oligosaccharide” and “polysaccharide” refer to larger such aggregates, with “a few” and many monosaccharide units, respectively. Current usage seems to draw the distinction between “few” and many at around 10 units.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, a number of relatively pure carbohydrates such as sucrose, cellulose from cotton, starch, glucose, fructose, mannose and lactose were known to the chemists of Europe, especially in Germany. In 1878, Emil Fischer synthesized phenylhydrazine for his thesis at the University of Munich. In 1884 he further discovered that carbohydrates gave crystalline phenylosazone in which two phenyl hydrazines reacted with the aldehyde group and the carbon adjacent to the aldehyde group.
Sources of Carbohydrates
We know carbohydrates are an important part of any human’s diet. Some common sources of carbohydrates are:
- Potatoes
- Maze
- Milk
- Popcorn
- Bread
NOTE:-
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Answer:
Structure of Carbohydrates
Carbohydrates consist of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. The general empirical structure for carbohydrates is (CH2O)n. ... The building blocks of all carbohydrates are simple sugars called monosaccharides. A monosaccharide can be a polyhydroxy aldehyde (aldose) or a polyhydroxy ketone (ketose).
