34° ALBERT DORFMAN AND SARA SCHILLER 



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Discussion 



DiscHE : I think that the findings of Dr. Mathews in your laboratory about this 

 combination between the chrondroitin sulphate and proteins are of particular 

 interest because there appears here a possibility to introduce the factor of specificity 

 into the field of hexuronic acid-containing polysaccharides. The specificity cannot 

 be related in these compounds solely to the composition of the carbohydrate but 

 where proteins enter also into the structure and there is a multiplicity of poly- 

 saccharide molecules on every protein, there is also a possibility of variations, which 

 can be associated with changes in specificity ; this is a very interesting development 

 in this respect. I should like to make one remark on changes with age. I think we 

 must be very cautious in establishing any such correlations. Dr. Karl Meyer who 

 found such changes in the ratio between chrondroitin sulphate and keratin sulphate 

 told me that this finding is not valid for the rat. 



Rogers: Just two points, one of which might be of possible interest to Dr. 

 Dorfman, he just touched on the question of the /3-linkage. Recently we have been 

 examining cell wall preparations of Bacillus subtilis for a different reason altogether 

 and we had cause to make a trichloroacetic extract of the walls and found there, 

 rather to our surprise, a polysaccharide which we isolated in a homogeneous state. 

 It had exactly the same composition as chondroitin but had positive rotation instead 

 of a negative rotation and was hydrolyzed very readily with acid. We could not 

 separate a disaccharide from it after mild acid hydrolysis as you can with chon- 

 droitin. Finally, following very beautiful work of Barker and his colleagues, we 

 examined the infra-red spectrum at low wave numbers and this showed the 

 expected band at about 850 cm~^ which these authors found to be very typical of 

 a-linkages and indeed this band was not present in chondroitin, thus it rather looks 

 as though in this organism there is an a-linked substance which so far as we can see 

 at the moment has the same composition as chondroitin; but we have no evidence 

 that it behaves as a linear polyelectrolyte like chondroitin ; it may be a highly 

 branched chain compound. We have also looked at several species of micro- 

 organisms during the last few years for the distribution of hexosamine-containing 

 compounds and found that over 95% of materials which contain amino sugars 

 appear to be outside the permeability membrane. We took the soluble protein con- 

 stituents and we could never find more than about 5% of the total hexosamine of 



