Production of xylo-oligosaccharides (XOS) of tailored degree of polymerization from acetylated xylans through modelling of enzymatic hydrolysis

Xylo-oligosaccharides (XOS) are emerging prebiotics that have recently been gained a great interest in the market of functional foods. Since their beneficial activity strictly depends on their chemical structure and on their degree of polymerization (DP), in this work an enzymatic method was developed to produce XOS with variable and modellable DPs, involving a combination of a commercial endo-β-1,4-xylanase M3 from Trichoderma longibrachiatum and a deacetylase, using a commercial acetylated standard xylan as substrate. A Design of Experiment (DoE) was developed and through the variation of some hydrolysis conditions, some experiments allowed to obtain significant amounts of XOS with DP 7–10, up to 11%, despite XOS with DP 2–4 were always the most abundant (60–96% of total XOS). The most impacting parameter on the XOS distribution was the order of addition of the xylanase and deacetylating enzyme, while pH showed to have a great influence on the total yield. The method was also tested on an acetylated xylan extracted from grape stalks, structurally similar to the commercial standard xylan. The model was found to work in a very similar way also on the non-purified xylan sample, allowing the manipulation of enzymatic hydrolysis on a low-cost by-product, with the potential to obtain on a large scale XOS with high added value and with a specific DP, depending on the final application.