In a previous paper¹⁾, it was reported that carps are able to synthesize Lascorbic acid from D-glucose and D-glucuronolactone. In the present study, the conversion of myo-inositol to L-ascorbic acid by carps has been investigated by means of radioactive tracer techniques. The results obtained are as follows:
1) After injection of myo-inositol-U-¹⁴C into carps, the specific activities of the visceral ascorbic acid were determined. From the data in Table 1, it is evident that carps are able to convert myo-inositol to L-ascorbic acid.
2) The visceral ascorbic acid labeled with ¹⁴C was identified to be L-form by paper chromatography (Fig. 1).
3) The ascorbic acid recovered from the carps administrated with uniformly labeled myo-inositol-¹⁴C was degraded to determine the activities of the constituent carbon atoms. The results (Table 3) show that uniformly labeled myo-inositol-¹⁴C was converted to uniformly labeled L-ascorbic acid-¹⁴C.