The freshly-expressed yeast juice causes concentrated solutions of cane sugar, glucose, laevulose and maltose to ferment with the production of alcohol and carbon dioxide, but not milk-sugar and mannose.
The osazone prepared from a-acrose resembled most closely the glucosazone yielded by glucose, mannose, and fructose, but it was optically inactive; also the ketose which it gave after treatment with hydrochloric acid and reduction of the osone was like ordinary fructose except that it was inactive.
Fischer's a-acrose therefore led to the synthesis of the dextro and laevo forms Gf mannose, glucose and fructose; and these substances have been connected synthetically with many other sugars by means of his cyanhydrin process, leading to higher sugars, and Wohl and.
The next important aldose is mannose.
If the configuration of d-saccharic acid were given by either 6 or To, bearing in mind the relation of mannose to glucose, it would then be necessary to represent d-mannosaccharic acid by either 7 or 8 - as the forms 6 and Io pass into 7 and 8 on changing the sign of a terminal group; but this cannot be done as mannosaccharic acid is optically active.