During the last decade physical and chemical methods have improved rapidly - a fact which allowed the mode of action of antibiotics to be studied - and many biochemically-oriented scientists have devoted their research to the following questions: 1. What is the metabolic pathway that is inhibited selectively, and what are the target molecules within a sensitive cell? 2. What are the relationships between the chemical structure of an antibiotic and the physicochemical properties of the sensitive mole cule(s)? 3. Why and how far is the action selective? 4. Is it possible to correlate the...

Our knowledge of the biochemistry and biophysics of dinitrogen fixa tion has developed rapidly in the 15 years since the first N2-fixing enzyme system was successfully extracted from a bacterium. This peri od has produced a literature that now describes the N2 fixation reac tion and the nitrogenase enzyme itself in sophisticated terms, though a detailed reaction mechanism at the chemical level has not yet emerged. It is the purpose of the present monograph to present an in-depth re view, analysis, and integration of this research as is possible with a non-contributed publication and to relate...

In the few years since the first edition of this book made its appearance, under takings in the area of protein sequence determination have increased at an almost logarithmic pace. The logic governing such efforts has, predictably, retreated from a simple sense of curiosity in achieving something that had not previously been done, to be replaced by an absolute requirement for sequence information as the best means for understanding heretofore unattainable aspects of chemical, and structural and functional mechanistic phenomena. Witness, for example, recent volumes of the Annual Review of...

Enzyme kinetics has undergone very rapid growth and development during the past fifteen years and has been well received by the biochemical community. A cursory glance at the current biochem ical literature reveals the increasing popularity of enzyme ki netics1 yet, there are very few books available to guide the enzymologist who wishes to conduct kinetic experiments. This monograph was undertaken to provide the fledgling kineticist with an outline of contemporary initial rate enzyme kinetics. A large portion of the material contained in this book is presented in a second-year, graduate-level...

1. Secondary Metabolism and Differentiation In addition to the primary metabolic reactions, which are similar in all living beings (formation and breakdown of nucleic acids and proteins as well as of their precursors, of most carbohy drates, of some carboxylic acids, etc. ), a vast number of metab olic pathways lead to the formation of compounds peculiar to a few species or even to a single chemical race only. These reac tions, in accord with CZAPEK (1921) and PAECH (1950), are summed up under the term "secondary metabolism," and their products are called "secondary metabolites. " The wide...

The development of an area of scientific research is a dynamic process with its own kinetic equations and its own physical mech anism. The study of fast chemical interactions and transformations is such an area, and while it is tempting to draw analogies or to speculate about the simplest model system, the lack of ade quately averaged observables is an annoying obstacle to such an undertaking. Sciences suffering from such conditions usually avoid quantitative models, be they primitive or complex. Instead, they prove their point by "case histories." Chemical relaxation kinetics started as an...

Transition metal ions in biological systems are of interest in biology, biochemistry, chemistry, medicine, and physics. Scien tists with rather different viewpoints, employing many methods, have contributed to this area. A concise review of the current state of the field will, to some extent, reflect the special knowledge of the person writing it - in this case application of physical methods to the investigation of metal coordination. x ray diffraction is one of the most important of these methods, but a useful treatment of X-ray structure analysis would be com parable in size with and...

Confusion now hath made his masterpiece Macbeth II iii 72 Whence and what are those execrable shape? Paradise Lost Ib 1 681 Confusion worse confounded Paradise Lost Ib 1 995 When the manuscript for the first part of this book was proposed, it was anticipated that the discussion of the entire field of protein se quencing could be covered in a single volume - from purification and characterization of the protein through fragmentation by chemical or enzymic means and, finally, to reassembly of the identified individual peptides into the reconstructed total sequence. It soon became evident that...

This publication presents the culmination of collaborative effort between specialists in the wide range of disciplines concerned with the effects of ionizing radiations on nucleic acids. The authors belong to a group formed under the aegis of the Com mission of the European Communities some eight years ago with the object of facilitating the exchange of ideas and inforrration between European scientists working in this field. The Commission'S aim was not to replace traditional information channels, but to strengthen the various links between the scien tists in the group, as if they were...

The aim of this monograph is to summarize the essential features which characterize the behavior of regulatory systems. Firstly we discuss the laws which govern ligand binding in thermodynamic terms. The basic cooperative and allosteric phenomena are des cribed in thermodynamic terms without assuming any particular mo del. Then the molecular models developed by Monod, Wyman and Changeux and by Koshland, Nemethy and Filmer are presented in detail. Special emphasis has been given to the analysis of the Hill coefficient and its meaning both in thermodynamic terms and in terms of the two...