THE METABOLISM OF PURINES IN AEROBACTER AEROGENES: A STUDY OF PURINELESS MUTANTS

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/ THE METABOLISM OF PURINES IN AEROBACTER AEROGENES: A STUDY OF PURINELESS MUTANTS1 Department of Bacteriology and Immunology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts Received for publication June 4, 1954 Amino acid deficient bacterial mutants have been of great value in the elucidation of the biosynthesis and the metabolic relationships of amino acids (Davis, 1952). Similarly, purineless and pyrimidineless mutants should be of value for the study of the metabolism of the components of nucleic acids. However, most purineless mutants isolated have been found to be nonexacting in their requirements and consequently their study could throw little light on the metabolism of purines. The isolation of a nonexacting purineles mutant and of a guanineless mutant from the same parent strain of Aerobacter aerogenes has been reported from this laboratory (Ushiba and Magasanik, 1952; Magasanik and Brooke, 1954). The guanineles mutant was capable of synthesizing the purine ring as shown by the accumulation of xanthosine in its culture medium (Magasanik and Brooke, 1954). This paper presents a comparison of the growth requirements of these two mutants and of their probable genetic blocks and discuss the implications of these observations on the biosynthesis of nucleic acid adenine and guanine in A. aerogenes. MATERIALS AND METHODS The isolation of the auxotrophic guanineless mutant, strain P-14, of A. aerogenes by ultraviolet irradiation of strain 1033 has...