Degradation of Polysaccharide in Fenton Oxidative Cleavage Reaction and Their Antioxidant Activity

Abstract

One of well known methods for degrading polysaccharide is to use the reactive oxygen species. The fenton reaction can produce aggressive OH-radical, which is one of potential species of ROS, from hydrogen peroxide in the presence of catalytic metal ions. Ascorbic acid acts as a potent antioxidant necessary to cope up these oxidative damages. We found that ascorbic acid also exhibits pro-oxidant characteristics in the presence of catalytic metal ions, which can reduce the redox-active metal ions. Active size of molecules was obtained via degradation of higher molecular weight chitosan and hyaluronic acid, to obtain such active molecules, fast digestion was performed based on fenton reaction to determine the anti-oxidant activity of these molecules. Our results indicated that lysates from both the parental polysaccharides possess significant radical scavenging activity which proves that chitosan and hyaluronic acid are good anti-oxidants in terms of scavenging free radicals.