Recent Research Progresses of Membrane Separation Technology Used for Oligosaccharides Preparation and Separation

The oligosaccharides are low-molecular-weights molecules degraded from polysaccharides. They possessed versatile physiological activities such as antioxidant, antitumor, antivirus and immune regulatory activities and have become the focus of functional food researches. Recently, the separation and preparation of oligosaccharides mainly used ion exchange chromatography, gel permeation chromatography and their union methods. However, these methods have disadvantages such as long separation time, high preparation costs and difficulty for large scale applications. The membrane separation technology can realize the separation of bi-components or multi-components based on the selective permeation process. It possessed several advantages such as easy operation, good separation effects, high efficiency and low energy consuming. Especially, it could be directly converted into large scale industrial applications and therefore it holds great potential for separation and preparation of oligosaccharides. The review systematically summarized the recent advances on the classification, separation operations and applications of membrane separation technology in oligosaccharides separation. In addition, it also discussed the challenges of membrane separation technology in applications of oligosaccharides separation processes.