ON THE GROWTH AND THE PROTEOLYTIC ENZYMES OF CERTAIN ANAEROBES

In a work that soon will be published one of us, Blanc has extensively studied the biochemistry of certain anaerobes, especially Bacillus sporogenes and Bacillus histolyticus. It seemed to be of interest also to introduce in that work the methods, especially worked out in America by Clark and Lubs (1917) and their followers, for studying the influence of hydrogen ion concen-tration in its relation to growth and proteolytic activity. The other of us, Dernby, has already in a series of papers used these methods (Dernby 1918, Dernby and Avery 1918 and Dernby and David 1920), and as we have limited this paper to as short a communication as possible, we may for the description of methods refer to these papers mentioned above. What will follow are merely the main results of our work with some anaerobic micro-organisms. Some time ago, Wolf and Harris and Wolf and Telfer (1917) studied the biochemistry of the anaerobes, B. welchii (perfringens) and B. sporogenes (Metchnikoff), taking into consideration the influence of hydrogen ion concentration. It seems, however, that they, like many other authors at that time, paid too much attention to what is called "the limiting hydrogen ion concen-tration " and the influence of organic acids on the growth of the micro6rganisms. In our opinion the first thing to do, when studying the biochemistry of a given micro6rganism, is to deter-mine the limiting and the optimal pH values for the growth of this organism in a given medium. We by no means claim that either of these values should be used as a new basis of classifyin