“…Starch, CD and MOS can act as substrates in all four reactions. Starch is generally a donor of glucose residues, CD can be recognised as a donor (French et al ., 1954;Vetter et al ., 1992;Kobayashi et al ., 1995), MOS can be recognised as donors as well as acceptors, depending on medium composition, and short oligosaccharides are acceptors. Even if this enzyme shows a high donor structure specificity (linear or cyclic polymers of glucose residues with a(1 0/4) glucosidic bonds), its poor acceptor specificity allows the use of a large range of acceptor molecules (Nakamura et al ., 1994;Bender, 1985) so long as their non reducing end has the C 2 , C 3 , and C 4 configuration of a glucopyranose.…”