Abstract:
After high-speed centrifugation, fresh natural rubber latex from Hevea brasiliensis was divided into three fractions, i.e., cream, C-serum and bottom fraction (BF). BF contains the substrates and enzymes, including isopentenyl diphosphate (IDP), which are necessary for a formation of new rubber and polyprenol. The in vitro rubber biosynthesis was found to form by the incubation of fresh BF at 37°C for 6 h after pre-incubation with an addition of substrates at 4°C for overnight. In the rubber biosynthesis pathway, there are two substrates involved with the rubber biosynthesis, i.e., farnesyl diphosphate (FDP), as initiating species and IDP, as a chain elongation. The attempt in this present work was to elucidate the effect of the concentration of FDP and IDP on the rubber and polyprenol formations from the in vitro biosynthesis by using fresh BF system. In this work, the newly formed rubber was obtained from the incubation of fresh BF with an addition of FDP, IDP or a combination of FDP and IDP, which was subjected to incubation, as the condition ascribed above. It was found that the amounts of FDP and IDP affected rubber yield significantly. The high amount of FDP, with the presence of low IDP amount gave higher rubber yield than that obtained from the addition of IDP alone. In addition, the highest rubber yield was obtained from the addition of only exogenous FDP at low amount. This indicates that there was a competitive reaction between FDP and IDP to form polyprenol and rubber, respectively. However, the reproducibility of the experiment was found to be poor due to the occurrence of hard gel formation in the BF after extraction with toluene. In the case of polyprenol formation, it was found that the polyprenol yield, which was calculated by quantitative measurement using 1H-NMR, was very low. The qualitative analysis of polyprenols was confirmed by reversed phase-thin layer chromatography (RP-TLC) in comparison with the authentic standards. However, the structure of polyprenol could not clarify due to its low amount.