BACTERIOLOGICAL CHEMISTRY 



CHAPTER I 

 INTRODUCTION 



THE subject of Bacteriological Chemistry has been 

 steadily growing in scope and importance since the 

 days when Pasteur studied the fermentation reactions, 

 normal and abnormal, until, during the past one or two 

 decades, it has expanded with such rapidity that it has 

 now almost acquired the dignity of a special branch of 

 Biochemistry, and is even in danger of itself becoming 

 subdivided with production of such offshoots as Immuno- 

 chemistry. This rapid growth is in part due to the 

 ever-increasing utilisation of microbiological methods 

 and products in industry, and in part to purely academic 

 investigations into the mechanisms by which the bacteria, 

 yeasts and fungi gain the energy for their growth and 

 reproduction and synthesise the multitudinous products 

 which they build into their cell structures or excrete into 

 the medium in which they develop. The combination of 

 utilitarian and academic motives has resulted in the 

 accumulation of a vast number of facts which are only 

 just beginning to be shaped into an ordered whole in 

 which it is possible to see the relationships between 

 apparently quite different modes of metabolism, and the 

 ))ewildering variety of substances elaborated during such 

 l^rocesses . 



A great deal of the information which we possess is 

 still only of an empirical nature and we have not yet 

 found out how to fit these facts into the general picture. 

 The present stage of development of microbiological 



