LIGHT-SCATTERING EXPERIMENTS TO FOLLOW THE DEGRADATION PROCESS OF HYDROXETHYL-CELLULOSE DUE TO TRICHODERMA-REESEI CELLULASE

The process of enzymatic degradation of the high-molecular hydroxyethyl-cellulose was followed by means of static low angle laser light scattering (static LALLS) which proved to be an excellent analytic method to obtain continuously an information about the decrease of the weight average molecular weight M//W without any manipulation of the substrate and enzyme, respectively. Moreover, due to the high sensitivity of LALLS the required substrate as well as enzyme concentration can be made much lower than needed for other physico-chemical techniques. For a kinetic treatment the experimentally obtained M//W-data must be converted to M//n-values in order to get the number of bonds broken as a function of time. Exploitation of a formal concept based on the assumption of random scission of bonds of an initially monodisperse substrate would be one way to gain the number average molecular weight.