D-(+)-Maltose monohydrate is used as a sweetener with about one-third the sweetness of sucrose and as a nutrient in culture media. It is used in pharmaceutical formulations and as a parenteral supplement of sugar for diabetics. The importance of bacteria was recognized as it led to a study of disease prevention and treatment of diseases by vaccines. Bacteriology has developed and can be studied in agriculture, marine biology, water pollution, bacterial genetics and biotechnology.
Maltose in aqueous solution exhibits mutarotation, because the α and β isomers that are formed by the different conformations of the anomeric carbon have different specific rotations, and in aqueous solutions, these two forms are in equilibrium.
Maltose also known as maltobiose or malt sugar, is a disaccharide formed from two units of glucose joined with an α bond. In the isomer isomaltose, the two glucose molecules are joined with an α bond. Maltose is the two-unit member of the amylose homologous series, the key structural motif of starch.
maltose is a reducing sugar, because the ring of one of the two glucose units can open to present a free aldehyde group; the other one cannot because of the nature of the glycosidic bond.
