Fig. 4.

Radical-induced oxidative degradation of polyoxyethylene (POE) moieties in polysorbates. The variety of products is dependent on different factors such as the position of the attacked POE chain or C-atom within the POE chain, leading to the formation of different degradation products such as (A) formic acid, (B) formaldehyde, (C) acetic acid. This figure is adapted from Kishore et al. (2011) and Dwivedi et al. (2018) (Kishore et al., 2011a; Dwivedi et al., 2018). The reaction sites are marked by brown circles.