Researched
Enzymes: life without cells
Eduard Buchner fermented sugar with a cell-free yeast extract in 1897, showing that chemical catalysts, not a vital force, drive life's reactions.
Open in the interactive tree →His pressed yeast juice made alcohol without a single living cell, which won him the 1907 Chemistry Nobel Prize. James Sumner crystallised the first enzyme, urease, in 1926 and showed that enzymes are proteins.
Prerequisites
Unlocks
- Krebs cycle1937
- Gene regulation (operon)1961The lac operon was worked out by studying how cells switch on a sugar-digesting enzyme