Can fasting fowls synthesize glycocoll or ornithine?

Abstract

According to Suga 1 “starving hens (unlike well-fed birds) are unable to synthesize hippuric acid from benzoic acid and glycocoll; they conjugate injested benzoic acid with ornithine into ornithuric acid and excrete the latter compound.” This is contrary to other authors, as Thomas 2 found that chickens kept on an inadequate diet could not even produce ornithine for conjugation with benzoic acid. Crowdle aand Sherwin 3 found that hens on a carbohydrate diet were able to synthesize ornithine under these conditions but found no glycocoll compounds; in other studies 4 where chickens were fed toxic organic compounds such as were detoxicated in the animal body by union with glycocoll, no combination with glycocoll was ever found. They concluded that glycocoll was never used by the chicken for detoxication purposes and these results were corroborated by the work of Yoshikawa 5 who fed chickens benzoic acid and glycocoll together and found that, in spite of this, benzoic acid was not conjugated with glycocoll but that it was burned in the body of the fowl and the benzoic acid conjugated with ornithine. Unfortunately this experimenter does not state whether his birds were “well fed” nor does he even mention the type of diet. It seemed worth while to follow up this clue regarding glycocoll synthesis in the organism of the fowl and at the same time we thought it might give some valuable hints as to the difference between the metabolism during fasting and while on a normal diet. We decided to place a few hens on a normal complete diet and then feed them benzoic acid in order to determine whether glycocoll might conjugate with the benzoic acid, thus causing the excretion of hippuric acid and then after investigating this point to take up the point of difference between Thomas and Suga regarding the power of the starving hen to furnish ornithine for the detoxication of benzoic acid.