A maltoside is a glycoside with maltose as the glycone (sugar) functional group. Among the most common are alkyl maltosides, which contain hydrophobic alkyl chains as the aglycone. Given their amphiphilic properties, these comprise a class of detergents, where variation in the alkyl chain confers a range of detergent properties including CMC and solubility. Maltosides are most often used for the solubilization and purification of membrane proteins.

This article uses bare URLs, which are uninformative and vulnerable to link rot. (August 2022)

In 1980 Ferguson-Miller et al. at Michigan State developed n-dodecyl-β-D-maltopyranoside (DDM) as part of a successful effort to purify an active, stable, monodisperse form of cytochrome c oxidase.^[1] Maltosides have been used extensively to stabilize membrane proteins for biophysical and structural studies.