The work of Czapek (1) was partially checked and slightly extended. The results of Risi and Labrie (2) were checked. Hoffmeister’s (3) work was checked, all except the two percent yield which he claimed to have obtained.
A considerable amount of work was done in an effort to obtain sufficient crystalline material to identify. This was only partially realized. It was possible to obtain crystals in a yellow oil by extracting the hadromal mixture with ligroin. These crystals were aldehydic in nature. Because of the large amount of oil present it was not possible to obtain crystals pure enough to identify positively. It is believed in view of the experimental evidence that these crystals were coniferyl aldehyde. They gave similar color tests, were identical in crystalline structure, and similar in odor to a known sample of coniferyl aldehyde.
The white solid that was isolated :from the hadromal mixture by the method of Czapek seemed to be pure, as shown by the melting point which was 78°C. This compound was partially identified as a hydroxy aromatic aldehyde. This compound was not a color producing component of woody tissue which was shown by the fact that when treated with such reagents as phloroglucinol and hydrochloric acid, no color was produced.
Because of the large amount of impurities obtained by the previous method, a new method of separation was worked out, which consisted of extracting the benzene solution of hadromal with 5% solutions of NaHCO₃, Na₂CO₃, and NaOH respectively. This separated the hadromal mixture into four distinct groups with varying degrees of purity. The first two extracts on treatment with boiling ligroin gave minute crystals almost free of oils that were identical in crystalline structure, and similar in odor to coniferyl aldehyde. These first two fractions gave the characteristic color reactions of woody tissue, while the other two fractions failed to give these tests.
The next step is to take the four fractions of the hadromal mixture, and work out a suitable method of purification. In this manner it is believed that it will be possible to isolate and identify the components of the complex mixture. / M.S.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/112593 |
| Date | January 1939 |
| Creators | Leach, Byron Elwood |
| Contributors | Chemistry |
| Publisher | Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College and Polytechnic Institute |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, Text |
| Format | 24 leaves, application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
| Relation | OCLC# 30040911 |
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