ABSTRACT
Among agricultural crops that produce grains for use as human food, legumes or the pulses stand next only to the grasses, or Gramieae family, which include wheat, barley, rye, rice, and maize.1 A major constituent of human food is various types of carbohydrates, present in edible seed grains. The main polysaccharides from the edible seed grains of the Gramieae family are starches and cellulose. Various sugars, particularly sucrose, are present in the stem of sugar cane (Gramieae family) and sugar beet, which is a tuber. Legumes produce more varied types of polysaccharides and many more oligosaccharides than those produced by the seeds of grasses.2,3 Thus the sugars, which the grasses mainly produce, are sucrose, glucose, and fructose, whereas the polysaccharides produce cellulose and starches. Starch is the major reserve polysaccharide in grasses and some tubers (e.g., potatoes), whereas cellulose is their structural polysaccharide. Cellulose is insoluble and nondigestible in the human system. Besides these some hemicelluloses are always present as a binder for cellulose bers.
