Indican is a colourless organic compound, soluble in water, naturally occurring in Indigofera plants. It is a precursor of indigo dye.
Indican is a colourless organic compound, soluble in water, naturally occurring in Indigofera plants. It is a precursor of indigo dye.
==Chemical reactions== Indican is a glycoside. Its most significant reaction is hydrolysis of to yields β-D-glucose and indoxyl. Beta-glucosidase, a common enzyme, catalyzes this process. Because the hydrolysis is slow in the absence of the enzyme, indican can be viewed as a protected version of indoxyl. Once formed, the indoxyl is oxidized by atmospheric oxygen to give blue indigo dye. Since synthetic indigo is produced on a massive scale by chemical routes, i.e. 50,000 tons/y (2011), the prospect of a biological pathway is of practical interest.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).