STUDIES ON THE OXIDATION OF GLUCOSE BY PSEUDOMONAS FLUORESCENS
Abstract
CONTENT ALERTS Receive: RSS Feeds, eTOCs, free email alerts (when new articles cite this article), more» Information about commercial reprint orders: http://jb.asm.org/site/misc/reprints.xhtml To subscribe to to another ASM Journal go to: http://journals.asm.org/site/subscriptions/ N. ENTNER AND R. Y. STANIER Department of Bacteriology, University of California, Berkeley, California Received for publication April 17, 1951 Lockwood, Tabenkin, and Ward (1941) showed that many strains of fluorescent pseudomonads, grown in complex media containing a high concentration of glucose, will convert this sugar to gluconic acid and in some cases further to 2-ketogluconic acid, often with yields approximating 90 per cent of theory. These observations suggest that the metabolism of glucose by fluorescent pseudomonads may involve a direct oxidative attack, rather than a degradation via the glycolytic pathway; but the evidence cited above cannot be considered as conclusive proof that oxidation via gluconic acid is the only pathway for the breakdown of glucose. The extremely high concentrations of glucose employed, (over 10 per cent) might well have caused a derangement of normal carbohydrate metabolism, and called into operation a shunt mechanism not functional, as a rule, to any appreciable extent. The following experiments were designed to investigate the nature of glucose metabolism by