Due to poor Brazilians work on the structure of starch granules, the purpose of this review was to demonstrate the advances in current understanding of architecture and chemical structure of this polymer. Many studies evaluating the relationship between the molecular structure of starch and its behavior in some physicochemical properties, suggest that several structural features, such as amylose content, amylopectin chain length distribution and the degree of crystallinity in the granule, are closely related to the events associated with gelatinization and retrogradation as starch granule swelling, amylose and/or amylopectin leaching, loss of radial structure (birefringence), supra-molecular (crystallinity) and molecular order, and recrystallization. The main focus of this review was to make a compiler of studies in order to gain better understanding of the granule structure and characteristics of starch components and physicochemical properties (gelatinization and retrogradation) that could play a significant role in improving the quality of different food products.
amylose; amylopectin; gelatinization; retrogradation
