Abstract
In the field of chemical studies of the mycobacterial constituents the fractionation methed originally reported by Anderson and his collaborators (1939) has hitherto been followed by a number of workers interested not only in configurational studies of components but also in biological and pathological approaches, until Lederer and his school (1952) made an improvement in fractionating the purified wax of tubercle bacilli further into hot acetone-soluble and insoluble fractions, i. e. Wax C and Wax D.
These two methods were successfully used and works have come out from this laboratory, reporting on neutral fat (Aoyagi et al., 1960), phosphatide (Kondo, 1960 a, b), Wax A (Tsumita, 1956), Wax C (Tsumita, 1956 b) and Wax D (Nojima, 1958 a, b) . At the present, however, it should be emphasized that chemical studies on mycobacterial components with a more complex nature are needed than that on simple lipids and lipopolysaccharides which can be isolated by means of organic solvents.
It is our present purpose to extract complex materials such as lipopolysaccharides or lipoproteins from defatted Mycobacteyia and to survey some of their biological properties.
