Coulometric generation of protons by oxidation of hydrogen dissolved in palladium, in non-aqueous media.
Coulometric generation of H(+) ions by the oxidation of hydrogen dissolved in palladium, in media such as acetone, methyl ethyl ketone, methyl isobutyl ketone, cyclohexanone, acetic anhydride and acetic acid-acetic anhydride mixture, for use in titration of bases, has been investigated. The hydrogen is oxidized at potentials which are much more negative than those of the bases and other components present in the solution. Titrations of numerous bases have established that the oxidation is quantitative and proceeds with 100% current efficiency.
Precise coulometry: the titration of pure sodium carbonate
A method is given for the precise and accurate titration of sodium carbonate with hydrogen ions generated by the coulometer described in the preceding paper. This coulometer maintains automatically a constant current for a measured length of time. The results are in good agreement with those obtained by titration with standard acid referred to pure silver as the ultimate standard, and support proposals to establish the coulomb as a standard in volumetric analysis. Factors are discussed that affect the accuracy and precision of analysis by controlled current coulometry.
New method for analysis of enzymatic reactions: Thermolysin-catalyzed synthesis of aspartame precursor
Aspartame is an artificial sweetener which is 200 times sweeter than sucrose. A precursor of aspartame, N-(benzyloxycarbonyl)-l-aspartyl-l-phenylalanine methyl ester (Z-APM) was synthesized and hydrolyzed with thermolysin in an aqueous monophasic system. Graphical plotting methods and/or nonlinear regression have been used to analyze enzymatic reactions because of the nonlinearity of enzymatic rate equations. There are, however, problems: the former require accurate measurement of the initial reaction rate and the latter gives no analytical information. The authors proposed a method to solve the nonlinear enzymatic rate equations with respect to the concentration of a product with the Taylor expansion, especially for the reversible Theorell-Chance mechanism (Murakami, Y., Hirata, M., and Hirata, A., J. Ferment. Bioeng., 82, 246–252, 1996). This solution, however, is complex for practical use. In this paper, a simpler solution to explain the thermolysin-catalyzed synthesis of Z-APM is obtained. New methods to determine the kinetic parameters, especially for the reversible Theorell-Chance mechanism, based on the approximated solution are proposed. The results calculated using the obtained kinetic parameters can satisfactorily explain the experimental results, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed analysis. We must know the relation between the concentrations of substrates and a product, and accurately evaluate of the result obtained using Taylor expansion when we determine the kinetic parameters using our newly developed methods. The methods to determine the kinetic parameters of the reversible Theorell-Chance mechanism described in this paper is, however, expected to be applied to general enzymatic reactions.