The two sugar molecules sucrose and trehalose are both considered as stabilizing molecules for the purpose of preserving biological materials during, for example, lyophilization or cryo-preservation. Although these molecules share a similar molecular structure, there are several important differences in their properties when they interact with water, such as differences in solubility, viscosity, and glass transition temperature. In general, trehalose has been shown to be more efficient than other sugar molecules in preserving different biological molecules against stress, and thus by investigating how these two disaccharides differ in their water interaction, it is possible to further understand what makes trehalose special in its stabilizing properties. For this purpose, the structure of aqueous solutions of these disaccharides was studied by using neutron and X-ray diffraction in combination with empirical potential structure refinement (EPSR) modeling. The results show that there are surprisingly few differences in the overall structure of the solutions, although there are indications for that trehalose perturbs the water structure slightly more than sucrose.

中文翻译：

---

水溶液中蔗糖和海藻糖的结构比较。

为了在例如冻干或冷冻保存期间保存生物材料，两个糖分子蔗糖和海藻糖都被认为是稳定分子。尽管这些分子具有相似的分子结构，但是当它们与水相互作用时，它们的性能仍存在一些重要差异，例如溶解度，粘度和玻璃化转变温度的差异。通常，海藻糖已显示出比其他糖分子更有效的保存不同的生物分子抵抗压力的作用，因此，通过研究这两种二糖在水相互作用方面的不同，可以进一步了解海藻糖在稳定化方面的特殊之处属性。以此目的，通过使用中子和X射线衍射结合经验电势结构优化（EPSR）模型研究了这些二糖的水溶液结构。结果表明，溶液的总体结构几乎没有差异，尽管有迹象表明海藻糖比蔗糖对水的结构影响更大。