The discovery by Wyss, Stone, and Clark' that bacteria grown on a substrate recently exposed to ultra-violet light are subject to high mutation rates shows clearly that some meta-stable chemical substance, probably of no great complexity, is an intermediate in at least a part of the mutagenic action of ultra-violet light. It was supposed that hydrogen peroxide might be responsible for these results, but subsequent work has shown that this cannot be the whole explanation.2 However, organic peroxides are known to be formed by the action of ultra-violet light on many compounds and such peroxides might very well be the intermediate agents producing the substrate irradiation effect.The process by which organic compounds, especially ethers, olefins and aldehydes, form peroxides simply on contact with molecular oxygen is not wholly understood. In many simple cases, however, a chain reaction of the sort pictured below appears to be involved.The peroxide-forming process is catalyzed by ultra-violet light9 which, presumably, supplies the energy for breaking a carbon-hydrogen bond in the first step.The hypothesis that organic peroxides play an essential r6le in the mutagenic action of ultra-violet light has been under investigation in this laboratory for some time. One result of this work, and the subject of the 581
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