Explain about the Qualitative Tests for Carbohydrates?

This section will familiarize you with simple techniques and tests to identify carbohydrates in a laboratory. The objective of qualitative analysis is the identification of the constituents of a substance, of mixtures of substances or of solutions and the manner in which the component elements or groups of elements are combined with one another. It does not involve determining relative proportions of these elements. Most of the tests are based on properties of carbohydrates discussed in the beginning of this section.

Several qualitative tests have been devised to detect carbohydrates. These tests will utilize a test reagent that will yield a colour change after reacting with specific functional groups of the compounds being tested. The following exercises are reactions that can detect the presence or absence of carbohydrates in test solutions. They range in specificity from the very general (i.e. Molisch test for carbohydrates) to the very specific (i.e. mucic acid test for galactose). So let us get to know about these qualitative tests.