2010 Volume 27 Issue 4 Pages 305-310
The nitrobenzene oxidation method is widely used for structural analysis of lignin. However, the conventional nitrobenzene oxidation method has several drawbacks including the requirement of a sizeable amount of sample material and the rather slow completion of the reaction process. In this paper, we describe a microscale nitrobenzene oxidation method using deuterium-labeled vanillin and syringaldehyde as internal standards. Using this method, we show that the microscale nitrobenzene oxidation method realized high-throughput determination of lignin components using a small amount of sample, i.e. 10 mg per reaction, and high reproducibility. Due to the small sample sizes, the oxidation reaction and extraction steps of a number of samples can be completed in parallel, thus enabling us to process more than 40 samples per day.
