15U Keport or Depaktment of Ammal Industry of the 



' On precipitating a bran extract, prepared as indicated above, 

 with any of the usual reagents for the isolation of the organic- 

 phosphorus compound the inorganic phosphates are more or less 

 completely precipitated at the same time. In order to remove 

 these inorganic phosphates we have found it necessary to repeatedly 

 precipitate the substance from 0.2 or 0.5 per ct. hydrochloric acid 

 with alcohol. In other words the substance has been re-precipitated 

 until the dilute nitric acid solution of the resulting product does not 

 give any immediate reaction with ammonium molybdate. The 

 slight amount of phospho-molybdate precipitated from the solution 

 on longer standing is no doubt due to cleavage rather than to admixed 

 inorganic phosphates. 



In order to determine if any barium salt of different composition 

 from those discussed above could be prepared directly from wheat 

 bran extract, the following experiment was carried out: The 0.2 

 per ct. hydrochloric acid extract of bran prepared as before was 

 precipitated with barium chloride and alcohol. The substance 

 was purified by precipitating from 0.5 per ct. hydrochloric acid 

 solution with alcohol until it gave no immediate reaction with 

 ammonium molybdate (compare experimental part). 



Analysis showed that this compound contained a higher per- 

 centage of carbon and lower of phosphorus than the barium salt pre- 

 pared from the previously isolated crude substance and it gave a 

 larger amount of furfurol on distillation with 12 per ct. hydrochloric 

 acid. By treating this compound with dilute sulphuric acid for a 

 short time some reducing body was split off and the organic-phos- 

 porus substance finally isolated from the reaction mixture corre- 

 sponded in composition with the barium salt first prepared, viz., 

 C25 H55 O54 Pg Ba5. This compound is, however, easily transformed 

 into C20 H55 O49 Pg as has already been shown. 



Since we have been unable to isolate any compound from wheat 

 bran corresponding in composition to a salt of phytic acid we have 

 come to the conclusion that wheat bran does not contain phytin and 

 that the above compound C20 H55 04g Pg is the only organic-phos- 

 phoric acid existing in bran. It appears, however, that in its natural 

 condition in the bran one or more as yet unidentified reducing 

 bodies, yielding furfurol on distillation with hydrochloric acid, and 

 which are easily split off by the action of dilute acids, are loosely 

 bound to this nucleus. 



The so-called " anhydro-oxymethylene di-phosphoric acid " an- 

 alyzed by Patten and Hart was undoubtedly a mixture of the above 

 compound and free phosphoric acid. This seems the more probable 

 as they had not made any effort to remove inorganic phosphates 

 in the preparation of their acid. 



The empirical formulas suggested in this paper are of course 

 purely tentative. We are now preparing larger quantities of the 



