Any of several carbohydrates, such as tetroses, pentoses, and hexoses, that cannot be broken down to simpler sugars by hydrolysis. Also called simple sugar.
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Any of several carbohydrates, such as tetroses, pentoses, and hexoses, that cannot be broken down to simpler sugars by hydrolysis. Also called simple sugar.
Group name of the simplest sugars, including those composed of three carbon atoms (trioses), four (tetroses), five (pentoses), six (hexoses), and seven (heptoses). The units from which disaccharides, oligosaccharides, and polysaccharides are formed.
A crystalline, sweet-tasting, very soluble carbohydrate consisting of a single chain or ring structure. Fructose, glucose, and galactose are monosaccharides. They are the end-products of the digestion of complex carbohydrates (e.g. starches), and disaccharides (e.g. milk sugar and table sugar). Monosaccharides are absorbed through the intestinal wall and carried in the bloodstream to tissues where they may be stored or used as an energy source.
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A simple sugar: a crystalline, sweet-tasting, very soluble carbohydrate consisting of a single chain or a single ring structure. Examples are fructose, galactose, and glucose.
A simple sugar; a carbohydrate that cannot be broken down to simpler substances by hydrolysis, e.g. glucose, fructose and galactose.
Monosaccharides (from Greek monos: single,
sacchar: sugar) are the simplest carbohydrates. They cannot be hydrolyzed into simpler sugars. They consist of one sugar and are usually
With few exceptions (e.g., deoxyribose), monosaccharides have the chemical formula (CH2O)n + m with the chemical structure H(CHOH)nC=O(CHOH)mH. If n or m is zero, it is an aldehyde and is termed an aldose, otherwise it is a ketone and is termed a ketose. Monosaccharides contain either a ketone or aldehyde functional group, and hydroxyl groups on most or all of the non-carbonyl carbon atoms.
Most monosaccharides form cyclic structures, which predominate in aqueous solution, by forming hemiacetals or hemiketals (depending on whether they are aldoses or ketoses) between an alcohol and the carbonyl group of the same sugar. Glucose, for example, readily forms a hemiacetal linkage between its carbon-1 and the hydroxyl group of its carbon-5. Since such a reaction introduces an additional stereogenic center, two anomers are formed (α-isomer and β-isomer) from each distinct straight-chain monosaccharide. The interconversion between these two forms is called mutarotation.[1]
A common way of representing the cyclic structure of monosaccharides is the Haworth projection.
In Haworth projection, the α-isomer has the OH- of the anomeric carbon under the ring structure, and the β-isomer, has the OH- of the anomeric carbon on top of the ring structure. In chair conformation, the α-isomer has the OH- of the anomeric carbon in an axial position, whereas the β-isomer has the OH- of the anomeric carbon in equatorial position.
The total number of possible stereoisomers of one compound (n) is dependent on the number of stereogenic centers (c) in the molecule. The upper limit for the number of possible stereoisomers is n = 2c. The only carbohydrate without an isomer is dihydroxyacetone or DHA.
Monosaccharides are classified by the number of carbon atoms they contain:
Monosaccharides are classified the type of keto group they contain:
Monosaccharides are classified according to their molecular configuration at carbon 2:
All these classifications can be combined, resulting in names like D-aldohexose or ketotriose.
This is a list of some common monosaccharides, not all are found in nature—some have been synthesized:
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