Carbohydrate transport by micro-organisms.

Abstract

It is 295 years almost to the day since the existence of micro-organisms was confirmed at a meeting of this Society. The minutes of that meeting of 15 November 1677 record Mr Hooke ̓s success in eliciting the appearance, in a suspension of black pepper in rainwater, of ̒. . . great numbers of exceedingly small animals swimming to and fro. They appeared of the bigness of a mite through a glass, that magnified about an hundred thousand times in bulk; and consequently it was judged, that they were near an hundred thousand times less than a mite.̓ Since some doubts had been expressed at previous meetings, the minute firmly concludes that ̒. . . there could be no fallacy in the appearance. They were seen by Mr Henshaw, Sir Christopher Wren, Sir John Hoskyns, Sir Jonas Moore, Dr Mapletoft, Mr. Hill, Dr. Croune, Dr. Grew, Mr. Aubrey, and divers others; so that there was no longer any doubt of Mr. Leewenhoeck ̓s discovery ̓. (Birch 1757.) It is not my purpose here to comment on the importance of that discovery to our physical and economic well-being, nor to describe the manner in which studies with micro-organisms have revealed much of the molecular basis of the events that enable cells to maintain and accurately to reproduce themselves. These topics have formed the subjects of previous lectures in honour of Leeuwenhoek ̓s memory. I wish to discuss a topic that, as far as I am aware, has been only touched on, once before (Gale 1957), yet that concerns the indispensable first step in the utilization of all food materials. I refer to the highly specific mechanisms that enable such food materials to enter microbial cells, and the means that regulate the operation of such systems. It is a measure of the rapidity at which biological information accrues, as well as an explanation of why a topic of such fundamental importance appears to have been neglected, that most of our still far-from-complete understanding in this area has been achieved within the past five years, and all of it since, in the first Leeuwenhoek Lecture (Fildes 1951) delivered exactly 22 years ago today, Sir Paul Fildes discussed ̒. . . the development of events which has made it convenient to foster a new branch of biology under the title Microbiology ̓.