The composition of cephalin

Abstract

The research described in this thesis was carried out in Canberra between July, 1953 and January, 1956 during the tenure of an Australian National University Scholarship, for which I am indebted to the Council of the University. The isolation of cephalin on a small scale suited to metabolic experiments was suggested to me as a project by my supervisor, Dr. F.D. Collins , who introduced me to the field of lipid analysis and gave me every encouragement and support to pursue my own ideas. For this I am very grateful and in particular for the services of his assistant, Mrs. M. Labutis, who generously carried out all the phosphorus analyses reported in the thesis. The novel approach to the problem of isolating cephalin, that is by chemical modification of polar substituents, arose from discussion with Dr Collins and was our mutual interest throughout. Thus, the promise of Early experiments in the preparation of 2, 4-dinitropheny cephalin (Chapter 5) and the methyl ester of the latter (Chapter 7) opened up many avenues in which we participated equally. However, acknowledgement has been made wherever Dr. Collins' results have been included to support the thesis. I also wish to record my indebted to Dr. D.M.P. Phillips, who informed me of the possibilities of the Janovsky reaction, which were developed as described in chapter 4. The preparation of the manuscript was greatly facilitated by the services of Mr. Gordon Arthur, who reproduced the figures and Mr. Val Paral, who photographed them.