An Evaluation of Confocal Microscopy for the Study of Starch Granule Enzymic Digestion

Industrially prepared wheat starch granules were stained with the fluorochrome Nile Blue A, and subjected to digestion with human saliva. Using a confocal microscope, the degradation of two granules was recorded in sets of optical sections gathered over a seven hour period. Each set of these optical sections was digitally processed to produce a reconstructed 3 dimensional image of the starch granules. Using this technique it was therefore possible to follow the internal and external digestion of each wheat starch granule in real time.