Abstract
A VERY important advance in our knowledge of this fundamental process has been made by Prof. Meyerhof in continuation of his well-known researches on the subj ect. Last January he announced (in Die Naturwissenschaften, 14, Heft 10) that he had succeeded in extracting the enzyme responsible for the production of lactic acid from carbohydrates in muscle, and gave an account of its properties. He has now carried matters a step further (Die Naturwissenschaften, 14, 32) and has been able to penetrate much more deeply into the mechanism of the change. The enzyme, obtained by extracting the finely divided muscle with isotonic potassium chloride solution at - 1° to - 2° and then centrifuging, readily forms lactic acid from starch and glycogen at a rate about two-thirds of that of the spontaneous formation of the acid in minced muscle. It is separated by ultra-filtration into a heat-labile inactive residue and a stable filtrate—the previously known coenzyme—which reactivates this residue. The coenzyme can be obtained either from muscle or yeast, and its addition greatly increases the amount of lactic acid producible from an excess of glycogen. The hexoses and the disaccharides are scarcely attacked, whereas lactic acid is freely formed, and at nearly the same rate, from glycogen, starch, and various degradation products of starch.
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HARDEN, A. The Formation of Lactic Acid in Muscle. Nature 118, 895–896 (1926). https://doi.org/10.1038/118895a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/118895a0