Abstract
Publisher Summary This chapter presents an account of the more recent developments in the chemistry of heparin together with the significant features of the earlier work. Heparin, the blood anticoagulant present in circulatory tissue is now recognized to be an important and chemically unique polysaccharide of considerable biological significance. To ascertain the origin of its blood-coagulating properties, crude cephalin was submitted to a careful fractionation. Fractions were obtained which unexpectedly inhibited the coagulation of oxalated, dog serum. This was a significant discovery because no anticoagulant had previously been found in mammalian tissue. Because of its abundance in liver, the anticoagulant material was named “heparin.” In addition to its role in the blood-coagulation process, heparin shows other types of biological activity, such as its action in clearing fat globules from the blood stream (alimentary lipemia) and its use in the treatment of frost-bite. Heparin also possesses activity toward certain strains of bacteria; for example, in a protein-free medium, heparin was found to be bacteriostatic toward Micrococcus pyogenes at 100 p.p.m.
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