The Journal of Medical Microbiology Vol. 9 No. 4

To STUDY the biological, physical, and chemical characteristics of staphy-lococcal 6-haemolysin, and also to determine its role in host-parasite interactions we needed to obtain a purified preparaton of S-haemolysin. At present, three methods (Wiseman and Caird, 1968; Kreger, Zabovetzky and Bernheimer, 1971; Kantor, Temples and Shaw, 1972) have been reported for purifying 6-haemolysin. In this investigation we tried to compare these methods and to test the purity of the 8-haemolysin preparations so obtained. Our findings indicate that when biological tests were used for establishing the purity of the final products none of the methods tested yielded a pure preparation of S-haemol y sin. MATERIALS AND METHODS Strain. The 146P strain of Staphylococcus aureus previously described (Murphy and Haque, 1971) was used. Crude 8-toxin. This was obtained by growing the culture on dialysis membranes as previously described (Murphy and Haque, 1971)