Structure determination by degradation

The natural world is one of eomplex mixtures petroleum may eontain 10 -10 eomponents, while it has been estimated that there are at least 150 000 different proteins in the human body. The separation methods necessary to cope with complexity of this kind are based on chromatography and electrophoresis, and it could be said that separation has been the science of the 20th century (1, 2). Indeed, separation science spans the century almost exactly. In the early 1900s, organic and natural product chemistry was dominated by synthesis and by structure determination by degradation, chemical reactions and elemental analysis distillation, liquid extraction, and especially crystallization were the separation methods available to organic chemists. 

Hygromycin A [1] is classified chemically as a member of the aminocyclitols antibiotic family represented by streptomycin and kanamycin. Its structure determined by degradation and spectral analyses, (72, 13) revealed that it consists of three unusual moieties, namely S-dehydro-a-L-fucofuranose, ( )-3-(3,4-dihydroxyphenyl)-2-methylacrylic acid, and an aminocyclitol (2L-2-amino-2-deoxy-4,5-0-methylene- eo-inositol). The 5-dehydro-a-L-fucofuranose moiety is attached by a glycosidic linkage of the 4-hydroxy position of ( )-3-... 

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