Abstract— >The inactivation of the enzymes chymotrypsin, lysozyme, ribonuclease, and trypsin by ultraviolet light can be accounted for quantitatively by summing the products of (1) the probability that light is absorbed by a given amino acid residue, the molecular extinc tion coefficient, and (2) the probability that absorbed light induces a chemical change in the residue, the quantum yield for the residue. The principal residues involved are cystyl and tryptophanyl. Peptide bond rupture is not important. Energy transfer among chromophores within molecules of enzymes need not be invoked in order to account for photochemical inactivation.
Quantum yields for the destruction of a number of amino acids at 2537 A have been measured.
Some quantum yields for the destruction of amino acids have been determined. The inactivation of the enzymes hymotrypsin, lysozyme, ribonuclease, and trypsin by ultraviolet light can be accounted for quantitatively by summing the products of (i) the probability that light is absorbed by a given amino acid residue, epsilon(4), and (ii) the probability that absorbed light induces a chemical change, with a quantum efficiency phi(4), in the residue. The principal residues involved are cystyl and tryptophanyl. Peptide bond rupture is not important. Analysis of inactivated enzymes verifies the assumption of the existence of several inactivation mechanisms.
As an introduction to the study of radiation‐sterilized soil as a medium for microbial and plant growth, survival curves for microorganisms have been obtained with 5 and 9 Mev. electrons, hard X‐ray and gamma radiation. For a given soil, bacterial survival curves with these radiations are almost superimposable, but they differ among soils. Bacterial numbers in soils approach zero at 2 Mrep. doses, but 4 Mrep. doses are necessary to insure complete sterility for larger soil volumes.
Soil sterilized by radiation still manifests enzyme activity (phosphatase, urease) in the presence of suitable substrates. If this is a general situation, studies of the uptake of some organic nutrients from sterile soil by sterile root systems will not be free from the problem of hydrolysis in situ. Sterilized soil is not toxic toward tomato plants nor does it provide extra nutrient to the plants as a result of radiation. It does, therefore, provide the plant physiologist with a medium for the study of uptake of inorganic nutrients by sterile plants which possesses all the purely chemical and structural features of natural soil.
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