Computational Molecular Biology 2025, Vol.15, No.1, 53-64 http://bioscipublisher.com/index.php/cmb 57 more stable cavitation bubbles, with the yield increasing by about 8%. However, this set of operations has higher requirements for equipment and is still at the laboratory stage at present. The selection of solvents is actually quite mysterious-although water extraction and alcohol precipitation are classic, when different concentrations of ethanol are used for precipitation, the molecular weight distribution of polysaccharides will change significantly (Figure 1). In the laboratory, it was tested that the polysaccharide side chains obtained by precipitation with 40% ethanol were particularly numerous, while the polysaccharides obtained with 80% ethanol had larger molecular weights but a more "rigid" structure. The solid-liquid ratio is even more an art. The range of 1:15 to 1:20 has the best effect (Yan and Wang, 2006). If it is too dilute, the solvent will be wasted; if it is too thick, the extraction efficiency will decrease instead. Interestingly, last year a team added some ionic liquid to water and found that certain specific anions could form hydrogen bonds with polysaccharides, and the extraction rate soared directly to 92%. However, when it comes to industrial production, the issue of solvent recovery still needs to be taken into account. Therefore, the mainstream method for extraction at present is still using warm water, after all, the cost is there. The latest research has found that when the pH is adjusted to weakly alkaline (7.5-8.0), the yield of polysaccharides can increase by another 5-8%, possibly because the cell wall is more prone to swelling under alkaline conditions. Figure 1 SEM images of CMMP−1 (A), CMMP−2 (B), CMMP−3 (C), and CMMP−4 (D) (5000×) (Adapted from Wang et al., 2024b) Image caption: CMMP−1, CMMP−2, CMMP−3, and CMMP−4 represent four polysaccharide components obtained from ethanol solid media with different ethanol concentrations (Adapted from Wang et al., 2024b)
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