Identification of Cell Division Inducing Compounds from Coconut Milk

The use of chromatographic techniques coupled with mass spectrometry, infra-red analysis and nuclear magnetic resonance revealed that the amino acid phenylalanine might be responsible for a large proportion of the cell division activity of coconut milk as determined by the soybean bioassay. The observation that zeatin can be removed very readily by partitioning against ethyl acetate at alkaline pH values, cautions against inclusion of this method as a purification step for extracting cytokinins from plant extracts. Mass spectrometry revealed the presence of an unidentified cell division substance with a molecular ion of 279 and which co-chromatographed with zeatinriboside on Sephadex LH-20.