Effect of Polysaccharide Conformation on Ultrafiltration Separation Performance

The manifold array of saccharide linkages leads to a great variety polysaccharide architectures, comprising three conformations in aqueous solution: compact sphere, random coil, and rigid rod. This conformational variation limits the suitability commonly applied molecular weight cut-off (MWCO) as selection criteria for ultrafiltration membranes, it is based on globular marker proteins with narrow Mw hydrodynamic volume relation. Here we show effect conformation performance using randomly coiled pullulan rod-like scleroglucan model polysaccharides membrane rejection distribution. Ultrafiltration 10 kDa polyethersulfone yielded significant different recoveries showing 1% 71%, respectively. We found deviations greater than 77-fold between nominal MWCO apparent scleroglucan, while recovering over 90% unchanged Mw. anticipate our work starting point towards an optimized applications.