Biochemical Nitrogen Fixation

TLDR: The present chapter on biochemical nitrogen fixation is the first to appear in the ten volumes of the Annual Review of Biochemistry now published, and attention will be focussed mainly on the last four years.

Abstract: The present chapter on biochemical nitrogen fixation is the first to appear in the ten volumes of the Annual Review of Biochemistry now published. The report will therefore be obliged to cover in some meas­ ure a decade of work in this field.. Attention will be focussed mainly on the last four years, with, however, no intended omission of im­ portant literature in the earlier six. Fortunately for the reviewing, the subject of biochemical nitrogen fixation, one of quite general inter­ est for the past hundred years, has made its advances more by decades than by years, so to speak, and latterly has been investigated inten­ sively by relatively few schools of workers, in particular-though by no means exclusively-by those schools abroad at Helsinki (Biochemi­ cal Institute), Brie-Comte-Robert (Pasteur Institute), Berlin-Dahlem (Biologische Reichsanstalt), Ultuna (Institute of Microbiology, Ag­ ricultural College of Sweden), and Harpenden (Rothamsted Experi­ mental Station), and in this country at Madison (Department of Agricultural Bacteriology, University of Wisconsin), Washington (former Fixed Nitrogen Research Laboratory), and intermittently at some half dozen state agricultural experiment stations. This cir­ cumstance of intensive localization in the study of the biochemical aspects of biological nitrogen fixation facilitates current crystallization of the main developments and controversies in the field, and evalua­ tion of the surprisingly numerous revisions of both interpretation and even observation that have transpired. With a view to ironing out many of the existing qifferences of viewpoint and conclusion, the re­ viewing has been undertaken by erstwhile representatives of both the Washington and Madison schools. Superseding corrections of pre-