LIBRARY 

 IVE 



Reprinted from THE JOURNAL OF BIOLOGICAL CHEMISTRY, VOL. X.IKfo. 3, 1< "^ QF 



NITROGEN FIXATION BY YEASTS AND OTHER FUNGI. 



BY CHARLES B. LIPMAN. 



(From the Research Laboratory for Soil Chemistry and Bacteriology, Univer- 

 sity of California.) 



(Received for publication, July 28, 1911.) 



Since the epoch making discoveries of Hellriegel 1 there have 

 followed in quick succession many series of investigations rela- 

 tive to the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen by living organisms. 

 Especially brilliant are the investigations of Winogradsky 2 on 

 Clostridium pastorianum and those of Beyerinck 3 on the Azotobac- 

 ter group, and it is unnecessary here to go into a review of the 

 investigations which have since added themselves to those, for 

 the reader is doubtless acquainted with the painstaking and inter- 

 esting researches of Gerlach and Vogel, Kriiger and Schneidewind, 

 J. G. Lipman, Lohnis, Christensen and a host of others to whom we 

 are indebted for information on the subject of the fixation of 

 atmospheric nitrogen by soil bacteria. Suffice it to say, that 

 the researches of the past twenty-five years have disclosed facts 

 which point emphatically toward the conclusion that the earth 

 is endowed with agencies which, at least in part, compensate for 

 the losses from our valuable nitrogen store from the soil which 

 are constantly going on. From the earliest of these researches 

 it appeared that the power of living organisms to assimilate atmos- 

 pheric nitrogen was limited to a small group of bacteria of which 

 the power seemed as characteristic and distinct as did the power 

 of the group of nitrifying bacteria to change ammonium com- 

 pounds to nitrates, but the later investigations soon brought 

 to light the fact that many bacteria other than those of the B. 

 radicicola, the Azotobacter and the Clostridium groups exhibited 

 the power, more or less pronounced, of fixing atmospheric nitro- 



] Ueber die Stickstoffnahrung der Gramineen und Leguminosen, 1888. 

 *Compt. rend, de I'Acad. des Sri., 1893. 

 3 Centralbl f. Bakt., ix, 2 Abt., p. 3, 1902. 



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