Sugar is the general name for sweet, short-chain, soluble carbohydrates, many of which are used in foods. Among the simple sugars we can include glucose, fructose, galactose and more.
When speaking of sugars or carbohydrates, from a scientific context, we are referring to a certain type of primordial organic macromolecules that are characterized by their sweet taste. They are made up of units of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms.
”The breakdown of sugar allows the release of chemical energy in the form of ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate), reusable for all other processes in the body.
key features
- Sucrose is produced in many different plants, most table sugar comes from sugar beets or sugar cane.
- Sucrose is a disaccharide, that is, it is made up of two monosaccharides glucose and fructose.
- Fructose is a simple six-carbon sugar with a ketone group on the second carbon.
- Glucose is the most abundant carbohydrate on Earth. It is a simple sugar or monosaccharide, with the formula C 6 H 12 O 6 , this is the same as fructose, which means that both monosaccharides are isometers of each other.
- The chemical formula of sugar depends on the type of sugar you are talking about and the type of formula you need, each sugar molecule contains 12 carbon atoms, 22 hydrogen atoms, and 11 oxygen atoms.
“The English chemist William Miller coined the name sucrose in 1857 by combining the French word sucre, meaning “sugar,” with the chemical suffix used for all sugars.”
What is its importance?
Sugars are an important source of chemical energy for organisms, they are fundamental bricks of larger and more complex compounds, which fulfill much more complex functions such as: structural material, parts of biochemical compounds, etc.
Formulas for different sugars
In addition to sucrose, there are various types of sugars.
Other sugars and their chemical formulas include:
Arabinose – C5H10O5
Fructose – C6H12O6
Galactose – C6H12O6
Glucose- C6H12O6
Lactose- C12H22O11
Inositol- C6H1206
Mannose- C6H1206
Ribose- C5H10O5
Trehalose- C12H22011
Xylose- C5H10O5
Many sugars share the same chemical formula, so it’s not a good way to tell them apart. The structure of the ring, the location and type of chemical bonds, and the three-dimensional structure are used to distinguish between sugars.
