Abstract
THE recent announcement in Science (104, 431; November 8, 1946) that du Vigneaud, Carpenter, Holley, Livermore end Rachele have isolated the, crystalline ammonium salt of syntnetic penicillin-II, identical in all respects with the optically active trie bylammonium salt of natural penicillin, has one more of the extraordinarily difficult series of problems that this remarkable substance has set. Readers will recall the statement on penicillin chemistry which appeared in Nature of December 29, 1945, p. 761, wherein an account was given of the co-operative effort of British and American chemists working under the auspices of the Medical Research Council (London) and of the Committee on Medical Research (Washington), and which will appear shortly in monograph form. During this highly successful essay in trans-Atlantic co-operation, chemists in the United States and in Britain were able to show that in the reaction between certain oxazolones bearing a potential aldehyde group and d-penicillamine, antibiotic activity corresponding to a 0.03 per cent yield of penicillin could be produced with regularity, and this could be raised to a 0.22 per cent yield under better conditions. This product, moreover, had a ‘bacterial spectrum’ similar to that of natural penicillin, and when isotopic ‘tracer’ technique was applied to the problem by use of penicill-amine containing radioactive sulphur, the added natural penicillin was isolated as a jbriethylammonium salt which could be recrystallized repeatedly without sensible variation of its radioactive sulphur content. In addition, tie presence of penicillin in the synthetic mixture was shown by its destruction by the enzyme penicillinase
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Crystallization of Synthetic Penicillin. Nature 158, 905 (1946). https://doi.org/10.1038/158905b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/158905b0