Rare sugars are regarded as functional biological materials due to their potential applications as low-calorie sweeteners, antioxidants, nucleoside analogs, and immunosuppressants. D-Allose is a rare sugar that has attracted substantial attention in recent years, owing to its pharmaceutical activities, but it is still not widely available. To address this limitation, we continuously produced D-allose from D-allulose using a packed bed reactor with commercial glucose isomerase (Sweetzyme IT). The optimal conditions for D-allose production were determined to be pH 8.0 and 60°C, with 500 g/L D-allulose as a substrate at a dilution rate of 0.24/h. Using these optimum conditions, the commercial glucose isomerase produced an average of 150 g/L D-allose over 20 days, with a productivity of 36 g/L/h and a conversion yield of 30%. This is the first report of the successful continuous production of D-allose from D-allulose by commercial glucose isomerase using a packed bed reactor, which can potentially provide a continuous production system for industrial applications of D-allose.
Keywords: D-allose; D-allulose; Sweetzyme IT; glucose isomerase; packed bed reactor; rare sugar.
Copyright © 2021 Choi, Shin, Kim, Kim, Park, Yeom and Kim.