M SAMISCH ONE Plant Physiol植物生理学.pdfVIP

CONTRIBUTION TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF PLANT PHENOLASES1 RUDOLF M. SAMISCH (WITHONE FIGURE) Introduction Respiratory chromogens are thought by PALLADIN and his coworkers (16,17) to play an important role in plant respiration. Dihydroxy and trihydroxy phenols are found among these chromogens. They are oxi- dized to quinones by molecular oxygen in alkaline solution. In acid solu- tion, a similar oxidation occurs in the presence of oxygen and plant phenolases. The possible role of phenolase in plant respiration has been questioned, because attempts to correlate activity with rate of respiration have failed; furthermore, phenolases could not be found in a large number of plants. It should, however, be born in mind that a correlation between phenolase activity and rate of respiration can be expected only if the enzyme is the limiting factor in the system. That this is not the case can be seen from the fact that the addition of phenolic compounds to a plant extract known to contain phenolase is followed by the development of colored products. In other words, the amount of enzyme present is larger than that required for the oxidation of a plant chromogen normally pres- ent and the -chromogen appears to be the limiting factor. The fact that phenolases have not so far been demonstrated in a number of plants may be due to the fact that the possibility of specificity among phenolases sueh as is known to occur among other enzymes has been ignored. Thus the reagents used for the determination of their presence may have contained reactive groupings that are attacked by some phenolases but not by others. That such a condition prevails will be shown in this paper, in which observations are reported wh