Dear Mayank,

Attached is a paper that covers the answer to your question.

I have copied some text from the paper for your consideration:

Chromatographic analysis of major non-structural carbohydrates in several

wood species – an analytical approach for higher accuracy of data

Michael Raessler,* Bianka Wissuwa, Alexander Breul, Wolfgang Unger and Torsten Grimm

Received 1st October 2009, Accepted 5th February 2010

First published as an Advance Article on the web 23rd February 2010

DOI: 10.1039/b9ay00193j

ABSTRACT

The exact and reliable determination of non-structural carbohydrates (NSC) in wood samples of different origin allows to gain further insight into the biogeochemical carbon cycle, i.e. processes that determine how carbon – and carbon dioxide – migrate between the land, the sea and the atmosphere.

Plants are an essential part of this cycle using carbon dioxide in photosynthesis and locking up carbon within proteins and carbohydrates. Analytical determination of NSC is complicated by the complexity of the carbohydrate mixtures. However, most of them are present at the trace level only, and do not substantially contribute to the global NSC. Most important are glucose, sucrose, fructose and starch.

Traditionally, these carbohydrates are analyzed spectrophotometrically. The spectrophotometric method does not provide any information on concentrations of sugar alcohols and raffinose. They can make up to a quarter of total NSC in deciduous tree samples. Consequently, ignoring them will severely impair the accuracy of NSC data in these samples. We will therefore present a method that allows the reliable determination of the following sugar alcohols and carbohydrates: inositol, sorbitol, mannitol, glucose, fructose, sucrose, raffinose and starch. These were the major contributors to the pool of nonstructural carbohydrates in the samples we examined. It is important to note, that the portion of sugar

alcohols and raffinose in the samples ranged from