The simpler natural bases / by George Barger.

  • George Barger
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The simpler natural bases / by George Barger. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Emmenthaler cheese (Winterstein and Thdny [1902]). Van Slyke and Hart [1903] found a little putrescine in ordinary Cheddar cheese, but none in a sterile chloroform cheese. According to Garcia [1892-3, 2, 3] the yield of the diamines from putrid horse meat and from pancreas is diminished by the addition of carbohydrates (compare p. 25); four-fifths is already formed in the first twenty-four hours of incubation and the maximum is reached after three days. Once formed, putrescine and cadaverine appear to be very resistant to bacterial action. Gulewitsch [ 1894] obtained cadaverine from horse meat kept four months at 150. Hyoscyamus muticus contains tetramethyl-putrescine (see appendix). Agmatine, C5H14N4. Agmatine, or guanidino-butylamine, was obtained by Kossel [1910, 1] from herring spawn after heating with dilute sulphuric acid (5 per cent, by volume) in an autoclave at 4 atmospheres pressure. The base differs from arginine by C02, the chief amino-acid in herring spawn, so that it may be considered as being derived from arginine by decarboxylation :— NH2. C(: NH) . NH . CH2. CH2. CH,. CH2. NH2 agmatine. NH2. C(: NH). NH . CH2. CH2 . CH2. CH(NH2). COOH arginine. Agmatine has also been isolated from ergot by Engeland and Kutscher [1910, I, 2] who obtained from their base on oxidation guanidine and guanidino-butyric acid, NH2 . C(: NH). NH . CH2. CH2. CH2. COOH. Kossel [1910, 2] synthesised agmatine from cyanamide and tetra- methylene diamine, NH2. CN + NH2(CHo)4NH2 = NH2. C(:NH).NH . (CH2)4. NH2. 1 Phenyl-ethylamine, C6H5. CH2. CH2. NH2. /3-Phenyl-ethylamine is of some interest, since it was the first putre¬ faction base of which the composition was determined. Nencki [1876] obtained the base from a mixture of 200 grams of ox pancreas and 600 grams of gelatin dissolved in 10 litres of water, which was putrefied at 40° for five days. Nencki, like Selmi and other early investigators of putrefaction bases, was most impressed by their analogy to vegetable alkaloids such as coniine and nicotine, and he at first considered his base to be a pyri¬ dine homologue, dimethylpyridine or collidine. Finding later that his hydrochloride, unlike that of collidine, yielded on destructive distilla-
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