Marine lipids
W.J. Dyer, rhat he was “wasting his time”. In fact the lipid and fatty
acid world was in a ferment because the new GLC technology meshed
perfectly with the developments in thin-layer chromatography (TLC),
mostly due to the work of E. Stahl. The introduction of the flame ionization detector (FID) for GLC to our laboratory in the form of a Wilkins aerograph Hi-Fy about 1963 created a whole new fascination
with quantitative analyses of fatty acids for which I developed the use
of theoretical FID response factors. It was a wonderful improvement
over thermal conductivity and argon |3-ionization detectors. The FID
“universal” detector was so tolerant that in our first capillary column
GLC unit, a Perkin-Elmer model 226, the design had the flame burning
upside down.
I am going to digress a little from lipids here to mention that in the 1960
era a good scientist could read all the important scientific journals.
One such reading was of Antarctic penguins having stomachs free of
bacteria because they ate krill which accumulated some of the algal
product dimethyl-b-propiothetin (DMPT) which broke down to acrylic
acid, a powerful antibiotic, and dimethyl sulphide (DMS), which had a
distinctive smell. When our fishing industry modernized the fleet
fishing off Labrador with modern trawlers, icing the fish instead of
salting fish on shore, the DMS odour common in that area suddenly
became a problem. I solved that by recalling the Antarctic krill and
quickly adapted GLC to measure the DMPT in Arctic pteropods the
source of the problem. The cod ate them and in digestion produced the
volatile DMS. Interestingly history repeats itself, and in 1998 DMS
appeared in scallops landed from our Nova Scotian shelf. One sniff by
myself and the problem was solved!
Luckily, the FRBC had published an excellent book on Alarine Oils in
1952, so I did not have to do a lot of basic work on producing commercial fish oils, and even today consult it because people still often
want the simple technology described for outports and small fish plant
operations. The other book that I read continuously was Fatty Acids
by K.S. Markley which had the world’s knowledge of 1947 on that
subject in one convenient volume. I have to mention the work of E. Klenk
in Germany, J. Mead, D. Malins, M.E. Stansby and the Hormel groups
in the USA, J.A. Lovern and R.J. Morris in the UK and Norwegian,
French and Japanese scientists too numerous to mention who were all
really important to me in achieving what I have myself accomplished
in marine lipids.
Sometimes little bits of information were of help when I decided to systematize the identification of marine fatty acids by GLC analysis of
methyl esters on polyester liquid phases. For example, both the 1964
report on seaweed fatty acids by Mrs H. Laur in Comptes Rendus and
a brief French report in 1965 that in the polyunsaturated fatty acid
isomers the (n-6) always eluted before the (n-3), enabled me to build up,
with confidence, both a linear log plot (fig. 1) and a separation factor
system for identifying the fatty acids of any fish oil or lipid analysed
on any polyester GLC column. It took a long time to convince medical
10
W.J. Dyer, rhat he was “wasting his time”. In fact the lipid and fatty
acid world was in a ferment because the new GLC technology meshed
perfectly with the developments in thin-layer chromatography (TLC),
mostly due to the work of E. Stahl. The introduction of the flame ionization detector (FID) for GLC to our laboratory in the form of a Wilkins aerograph Hi-Fy about 1963 created a whole new fascination
with quantitative analyses of fatty acids for which I developed the use
of theoretical FID response factors. It was a wonderful improvement
over thermal conductivity and argon |3-ionization detectors. The FID
“universal” detector was so tolerant that in our first capillary column
GLC unit, a Perkin-Elmer model 226, the design had the flame burning
upside down.
I am going to digress a little from lipids here to mention that in the 1960
era a good scientist could read all the important scientific journals.
One such reading was of Antarctic penguins having stomachs free of
bacteria because they ate krill which accumulated some of the algal
product dimethyl-b-propiothetin (DMPT) which broke down to acrylic
acid, a powerful antibiotic, and dimethyl sulphide (DMS), which had a
distinctive smell. When our fishing industry modernized the fleet
fishing off Labrador with modern trawlers, icing the fish instead of
salting fish on shore, the DMS odour common in that area suddenly
became a problem. I solved that by recalling the Antarctic krill and
quickly adapted GLC to measure the DMPT in Arctic pteropods the
source of the problem. The cod ate them and in digestion produced the
volatile DMS. Interestingly history repeats itself, and in 1998 DMS
appeared in scallops landed from our Nova Scotian shelf. One sniff by
myself and the problem was solved!
Luckily, the FRBC had published an excellent book on Alarine Oils in
1952, so I did not have to do a lot of basic work on producing commercial fish oils, and even today consult it because people still often
want the simple technology described for outports and small fish plant
operations. The other book that I read continuously was Fatty Acids
by K.S. Markley which had the world’s knowledge of 1947 on that
subject in one convenient volume. I have to mention the work of E. Klenk
in Germany, J. Mead, D. Malins, M.E. Stansby and the Hormel groups
in the USA, J.A. Lovern and R.J. Morris in the UK and Norwegian,
French and Japanese scientists too numerous to mention who were all
really important to me in achieving what I have myself accomplished
in marine lipids.
Sometimes little bits of information were of help when I decided to systematize the identification of marine fatty acids by GLC analysis of
methyl esters on polyester liquid phases. For example, both the 1964
report on seaweed fatty acids by Mrs H. Laur in Comptes Rendus and
a brief French report in 1965 that in the polyunsaturated fatty acid
isomers the (n-6) always eluted before the (n-3), enabled me to build up,
with confidence, both a linear log plot (fig. 1) and a separation factor
system for identifying the fatty acids of any fish oil or lipid analysed
on any polyester GLC column. It took a long time to convince medical
10