Since the time of the discovery and the first characterization of the Hill reaction (13,14) there have been many subsequent studies of this process. As might have been expected, the results obtained in these different studies are rather contradictory, so much so that it is not clear what the characteristics of the Hill reaction are. This point is well illustrated in the complete review of the older Hill reaction work found in Rabinowitch (30).From a preliminary consideration of this problem (26) it seemed possible that the contradictions in the literature were due to the use of intact chloroplasts by some workers and fragmented chloroplasts by others. The results obtained in this study have made it clear, however, that the observed properties of a chloroplast preparation are strongly influenced by a number of factors such as the stability of the material, the species plant from which the chloroplasts were isolated and its physiological condition, and the time needed to make a measurement, to name but a few.Additional complications have been introduced by the recent finding that phosphorylation can be an integral part of the Hill reaction (2). The purpose of this paper is to fit together the pieces of this puzzle, insofar as possible, and show that one description of the Hill reaction will suffice to explain the results obtained in different studies.
MATERIALS AND METHODSThe higher plants from which chloroplasts were isolated were field grown. The leaves were picked the day they were used and were kept in a water saturated atmosphere until they were ground. Elodea For the preparation of higher plant chloroplasts, washed turgid leaves were cut into pieces about 1 cm square. These were then ground with a mortar and pestle in buffer containing the following: 0.03 M phosphate usually at pH 7.0, 0.33 M glucose and 0.01 M KCl, unless otherwise specified. The suspension was filtered through Pyrex glass wool, centrifuged for 90 seconds at 100 G to remove whole cells and other debris, then decanted and centrifuged for 5 minutes at 900 G to bring down whole chloroplasts. This fraction was resuspended in the same buffer and centrifuged again before suspending in the final medium. Fragmented chloroplasts were removed from the whole chloroplast supernate by centrifugation at 18,000 G for 30 minutes. The supernate was decanted and discarded, and the tube rinsed with fresh buffer before resuspending the pellet. The chloroplast fragments so prepared were used without further washing.Algal chloroplast fragments were prepared by mixing washed packed cells with kieselguhr and grinding with a mortar and pestle. The mixture was slowly resuspended in buffer and centrifuged for 5 minutes at 1000 G to remove the abrasive and whole cells. The supernate was then treated as described above for higher plant chloroplast fragments. All chloroplast preparations were carried out at temperatures between 0 and 40 C.The photochemical activity of the chloroplasts was determined by measuring the rate of reduction of the dye 2,6, dichlorophenol ind...