Additional Transaminations by Insoluble Particle Preparations of Rat Liver

Abstract

Braunstein and Kritzmann¹ suggested that transamination in pigeon breast muscle was a general reaction involving most of the amino-acids; Cohen² was unable to confirm these results, and pointed out the lack of experimental controls. Further work by Cohen³ with purified enzyme preparations suggested that the transamination reactions were limited to L-glutamate + oxalacetate ⇌ α-ketoglutarate + L-aspartate and L-glutamate + pyruvate ⇌ α-ketoglutarate + L-alanine. Slower but significant reactions with other amino-acids have been shown to occur in kidney and liver homogenates by the same author⁴. Various workers^5–8 minimized these findings when assessing the general significance of transamination reactions.