Abstract
THIS book marks a new departure in the series of Monographs on Biochemistry, additions to which have appeared at intervals since its happy inauguration in 1908, for the subject has already been treated in an earlier volume of the series, Bayliss's “Nature of Enzyme Action” (1908), the last edition of which from its author's hand appeared in 1925. As the present author points out, Bayliss's book was strongly individual, and it was rightly thought that an entirely new work would be better than an attempt by an alien hand to bring Bayliss up-to-date. Bayliss's main thesis was that enzymes act as colloidal catalysts and combine with their substrates and other substances by adsorption, “so that the action of enzymes in general must be regarded as exerted by their surface”, and a large part of his book was devoted to the support of this view. In the present work this position is assumed almost without discussion, though it is carefully pointed out that “the assumption that an enzyme molecule activates only one substrate molecule at a time has worked remarkably well”.
Enzymes.
Prof. J. B. S. Haldane. (Monographs on Biochemistry.) Pp. vii + 235. (London, New York and Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., Ltd., 1930.) 14s. net.
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HARDEN, A. Biological Catalysts. Nature 127, 354 (1931). https://doi.org/10.1038/127354a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/127354a0
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