111E DETECTION OF KETONE BODIES has become an important clinical measurement during the past 50 years. The two types of reactions most commonly employed for ketone detection are nitroprusside tests, which react with acetone and acetoacetic acid, and ferric chloride tests, which react with acetoacetic acid but not with acetone. Ferric chloride tests are very insensitive, give false-positive reac...

1. Commercially available coenzyme A preparations were found to contain sufficient amounts of glutathione so that in the reaction with diketene significant quanties of acetoacetyl glutathione were formed. Unless allowances are made for this, significant errors in the interpretation of results can be made because liver mitochondria contain a very active acetoacetyl glutathione hydrolase. 2. Puri...

Previously we demonstrated that both diaphragm and adductor fibers from alloxan diabetic rats take up less acetoacetic acid than diaphragm and fibers from control rats (1). To date it has not been possible to show an influence of insulin on ketone utilization by muscle (2). The present paper extends the previous Fork on acetoacetic acid uptake to pancreatectomized rats, which show a decrease in...

In the course of studying the control of blood glucose in juvenile onset diabetics, we developed convenient methods for determining beta-hydroxybutyrate and acetoacetate. Here we describe fixed-time, enzymic, reaction-rate procedures for directly measuring these organic acids with a centrifugal analyzer (Rotochem IIA/36) or a computer-backed spectrophotometer (Gilford 102 system). In either cas...

An enantioselective, convergent total synthesis of the antiviral marine natural product (-)-hennoxazole A is completed in 14 steps (longest linear sequence) from commercially available 4-methyloxazole-2-carboxylic acid. Synthesis of the C(1)-C(15) pyran/bisoxazole fragment takes advantage of an aldol-like coupling between a dimethyl acetal and an N-acetylthiazolidinethione for the direct, stere...

Pathway analysis is a useful tool which reveals important metabolic network properties. However, the big challenge is to propose an objective function for estimating active pathways, which represent the actual state of network. In order to provide weight values for all possible pathways within the metabolic network, this study presents different approaches, considering the structural and physio...

The effect of fatty acids and ketones on 35S04 incorporation into the chondromucoproteins of embryonic chicken cartilage was studied in vitro. Both the nonstimulated incorporation (that occurring in media without added serum) and sulfation factor stimulated incorporation (that occurring in media with 5.0% rat serum added) were investigated. Butyrate and octanoate, from 0.01 mM to 1.0 mu, had mi...

The cerebral uptakes of glucose, oxygen, lactate, pyruvate, acetoacetate and beta-hydroxybutyrate were compared in the adult, the fetal, and the newborn sheep. Beginning 1-2 days after surgery, we withdrew samples simultaneously from an artery and from the sagittal sinus for up to 2 wk. At all ages glucose was the only substrate taken up in significant quantity relative to oxygen. The glucose-o...

Fed and starved rats were studied on successive days during a 5-day starvation period. The ability of ketone bodies to pass the blood-brain barrier was estimated by single common carotid injections of labeled ketone bodies and water, and results were expressed as the ratio between the normalized activities of tracers in tissue and blood, the brain uptake index (BUI). BUI of D-3-hydroxybutyrate ...

It has previously been found in this laboratory that in the biological synthesis of cholesterol the terminal methyl carbons of isovaleric acid are much more efficient carbon sources than the carboxyl carbons of the same compound and are also more effective sterol precursors than the carbon atoms of acetic acid (1). One explanation offered for these findings was that isovalerate is broken down t...