Abstract: Tea polysaccharide was extracted and purified from coarse old tea leaves that were sampled from Shangyou county of Jiangxi Province in China with the AKTA Purifier 100 biological macromolecule purified system. Its purity was identified by. . the high performance gel permeation chromatography (HPGPC). The results showed that the optimum purification technical parameters are: the sampling volume of 5 ml under the flow speed of 2.6 ml/min. The results demonstrated that this method is fast, simple, more effective and fit to be magnified. Then it was that its maximum polysaccharide and protein absorption are overlapped, implying that this component is a glycoprotein. HPGPC indicated that it is a homogeneous glycoprotein compo- nent and its purity exceeds 99%. At the same time, UV spectra and IR spectra also indicated that tea polysaccharide is a glycoprotein offering much information about its structure.

Key words: tea polysaccharides, purification, high performance gel permeation chromatography (HPGPC), UV spectra, IR spectra