Abstract
The branched structure of amylose was probed using concanavalin A (ConA) lectin, which forms precipitable aggregates with highly branched glucans, such as glycogen and amylopectin. Rice (japonica cultivar) amylose was fractionated from de-fatted, gelatinized starch by precipitation with 1-butanol (BuOH) and purified by ultracentrifugation and repeated crystallization. The purified amylose still has short side chains, whose chain-length (CL) distribution resembles that of amylopectin. More than 96 wt% of the amylose was not precipitated with ConA and remained in the resultant supernatant. The amylose recovered from the supernatant exhibited essentially the same size distributions of molecules and the CL distributions of main and side chains as those of amylose without ConA precipitation. The molar % of branched molecules was slightly decreased by ConA precipitation (-ConA, 11.6; +ConA, 8.1). These results suggest that the side chains detected in BuOH-precipitable amylose preparation are essentially attributable to amylose itself. Also, the non-precipitable nature of the branched molecules of amylose by ConA supports our previous proposal that the organization of the short side chains on amylose molecules is quite different from that found in amylopectin, in which the short side chains are arranged in a cluster fashion, and the branched glucan interacts with ConA to form precipitable aggregates. A tiny amount of ConA-precipitable glucan was detected, but its CL distribution was inconsistent with the size distribution of the branched molecules. Even if the precipitable glucans were fragments of amylopectin, their contribution to the branches detected in amylose should be minor.