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Communications to the Editor Vol. 86 form, affording nicotine and anabasine, which were separated by chromatography on alumina. The anabasine was degraded to determine the distribution of C14 and N16 in the molecule. Oxidation of the alkaloid with potassium permanganate yielded nicotinic acid, assayed as its methyl ester. Decarboxylation of the nicotinic acid by heating with calcium oxide afforded pyridine, collected as its oxalate. The activities of the alkaloids and their degradation products are recorded in Table I.The results indicate that essentially all the C14 in the anabasine was located at C-2' in agreement with our previous findings.3 It is also clear that the e-, but not the <*-, amino group of lysine is incorporated directly into the piperidine ring of anabasine. In experiment 1 the specific incorporation of the Nls (24.8%) into the piperidine ring was a little lower than the specific incorporation of C14 (31.1%). However ornithine.6 In the second experiment, involving lysine-2-C14-of-N16 the specific incorporation of N16 (2.27%) was much less than that of the C14 (38.6%).Our results are therefore consistent with the hypo-thesis3 that the piperidine ring of anabasine is formed from lysine via -ketoe-aminocaproic acid. Our recent observation6 that only the -amino group of ornithine is incorporated into the pyrrolidine ring of nicotine is complementary with the present work.

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