E07 Reducing sugars
This week exercise is about a test commonly used to detect glucose in urine, a diagnostic tool for diabetes. The test is called Benedict’s test and identifies so called “reducing sugars” (mostly monosaccharides) which have a free aldehyde or ketone group.
A full description of the principles, how to prepare the reagent and how to interpret the results can be found at this link.
Build your calibration curve assuming that (made up values) the absorbance of the different samples are:
0.05% glucose – 0.03
0.1% glucose – 0.02
0.25% glucose – 0.015
0.5% glucose - 0.01
1% glucose – 0.005
Unknown samples – 0.022
What was the concentration of your unknown sample?
For those interested in the technical part, in this video you'll find an explanation of principles of the spectrophotometer.