A new methodology for sucrose quantification in soybean seeds

The content of sucrose in soybean seeds is one of the most important characteristics responsible for the quality improvement of this product mainly concerning flavor and smell, being a critical factor in the elaboration of soybean-based products. The aim of this work was to develop a simple, low cost, spectrophotometric methodology for sucrose quantification in soybean seeds. In order to do so, the combination of the action of the glucose-oxidase enzyme, broadly used in the quantification of glucose, with invertase, a hydrolitic enzyme that breaks the glicosidic bond of sucrose forming fructose and glucose was performed. This system was adapted to elisa plates, making possible large scale analyses at low cost, with great potential of application in routine analyses in the improvement of soybean as well as other cultures. In order to validate this new methodology, the content of sucrose was quantified in the grains of fifteen varieties of soybean through high-performance liquid cromatography (HPLC) and through an enzymatic method developed by Stitt and collaborators, calculating, at the end, the correlation coefficient between the methodologies. These correlations proved highly significant mainly between HPLC and the developed methodology (r=0,9766), proving to be highly efficient in the quantification of sucrose.