Extraction of Reduced Wool Proteins by Solutions of Salts

Abstract

It has been shown earlier that the disulphide bonds in wool fibres are reduced specifically and almost quantitatively in aqueous solution using toluene-w-thiol (Maclaren 1962) or tributyl phosphine (Sweetman and Maclaren 1966; Maclaren, Kilpatrick, and Kirkpatrick 1968). The next step was to find a suitable solvent system to extract the proteins from the reduced fibre.