The use of acid alumina and sephadex LH-20 for the separation and characterization of ethanol-soluble peptides produced by Bacillus brevis.

Cell extracts from Bacillus brevis (A.T.C.C. 10068), grown with various media, incorporated certain (14)C-labelled amino acids that are normally components of tyrothricin into material that was extracted by ethanol from the precipitate formed by adding acid. When this material was separated by paper and silica-gel thin-layer chromatography and paper electrophoresis (14)C was located in those regions that also contained gramicidin and tyrocidine. From a study of the properties of the system responsible for the incorporation it was deduced that non-tyrothricin materials were present. It was shown that the methods normally used to characterize tyrothricin do not adequately distinguish between tyrothricin and non-tyrothricin materials. However, a method for separating these materials was devised. This involved elution with ethanol from columns of acid alumina followed by gel filtration on Sephadex LH-20 with dimethylformamide-water solvent. The behaviour of gramicidin and tyrocidine on the Sephadex LH-20 column was examined, and it was concluded that the separation was not caused simply by gel filtration of unassociated molecules. Also, tyrocidine molecules with different amino acid compositions seemed to have different affinities for the Sephadex LH-20 column.