Structure of Wharton's Jelly

Abstract

Bacsich and Riddell¹, in their letter of March 3 on the structure and nutrition of the cornea, cartilage and Wharton's jelly, suggest that the metachromatic staining of the cornea with toluidin blue may be due to heparin or some other related compound. Jorpes, Holmgren and Wilander² briefly reported that a substance prepared from cornea which had the properties of a mucoitin sulphuric acid showed only a very weak heparin activity. They thought that this activity was due to the small amount of heparin extracted from the mast cells at the limbus, and that the general metachromasia was due to the mucoitin sulphuric acid. Meyer and Chaffee³ have since isolated a mucoitin sulphuric acid from ox cornea and shown that it is the mono-sulphuric acid ester of hyaluronic acid, the sulphate-free polysaccharide which Meyer and Palmer⁴ had isolated from Wharton's jelly and vitreous humour. They found that it is present in the cornea in a concentration of at least 1·8 per cent. They failed to isolate mucoitin sulphuric acid from the sclera, which shows no metachromasia.