Structural studies of a polysaccharide from the seeds of Nelumbo nucifera

✍ Scribed by Srabani Das; Bimalendu Ray; Pradyot K. Ghosal

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1992
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 363 KB
• Volume: 224
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0008-6215
• DOI: 10.1016/0008-6215(92)84121-8

✦ Synopsis

The medicinal plant Nelumbo nucifea (Nymphaeaceae), a handsome aquatic herb with a stout creeping rhizome, grows abundantly throughout India, and its leaves and rhizomes are widely used to treat diarrhoea, dysentry, and dyspepsia'. While there has been considerable work carried out in studying various parts of the plant'-' the structure of its seed polysaccharide has not yet been reported. We now report on a neutral polysaccharide isolated from the seed of N. nuczfira. Extraction of the powdered and defatted seeds of N. nucifera with cold water furnished a crude ziilysaccharide that was further purified through fractionation over columns of Sephadex G-100 and G-150. The purified polysaccharide was found to be neutral and had [a]z6,, -19.6" (c 0.23, water). It appeared to be honmogeneous by high-voltage paper electrophoresis. Hydrolysis of the polysaccharide produced arabinose, galactose, mannose, and glucose in the * To whom correspondence should be adressed.