A Light-sensitive Yellow Pigment from the House-fly

Extraction of house-fly heads with neutral phosphate buffer yielded a dark brown solution from which a number of pigments were separated, either wholly or partially, by chromatography on a column of calcium phosphate mixed with celite. One of the pigments was light-sensitive, and had a yellow color, with a spectral absorption maximum at 437 mmicro in phosphate buffer at pH 6.5. Several consecutively eluted fractions from each chromatogram of the house-fly head extract showed the characteristic absorption curve of this pigment with no trace, spectroscopically, of the other pigments of the extract. The products of bleaching the pigment at pH 6.5 had an absorption curve showing plateaus at 440 to 460 mmicro and 350 to 360 mmicro and an inflection at about 250 mmicro. Above pH 8.0 the pigment bleached in the dark giving an absorption maximum at about 380 mmicro, and inflections at 290 mmicro and at about 250 mmicro. With 2.5 to 5 N HCl or H(2)SO(4) an absorption maximum at 470 to 475 mmicro was obtained with either the unbleached or the bleached pigment. With sulfosalicylic acid, ethanol, or heating at 100 degrees C., a part of the pigment was precipitated, leaving a light-stable yellow supernatant. This light-sensitive house-fly pigment cannot as yet be identified with any of the previously known insect pigments or with the photosensitive pigments of other animals, though these latter compounds exhibit some similarity in their spectroscopic properties.