CO-ENZYMATIC REACTIONS

Abstract

THE development of biochemistry, during the last two decades, has largely increased the number of known components of organisms, and beyond discovering them and surveying their distribution, biochemistry was able to assign to many formerly known and newly discovered substances their part in the structure of living matter, their part in the chemical reactions occurring in cells and tissues, and in the regulation of the functions of the organs. The large increase of our materia biochemica was proceeding simultaneously with the elucidation of the mechanisms of biochemical reactions, which appear, now, quite different from what could be imagined twenty years ago ; not only in the complexity of the intermediary transformations leading to the final products, but especially as concerns the nature and the numbers of reagents—of the organism's own reagents, of course—taking part in them.