Electrophoretic heterogeneity of glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase and its relationship to enzyme deficiency in man.

33 Kurland and Maal0e3E postulate that the effect is due to a constant small turnover of proteins. In the presence of chloramphenicol the degradation would be unimpaired, but since the rebuilding of proteins is stopped, the amino acid pool would be replenished. For this idea experimental evidence is given; indeed they showed that in bacteria which had been starved for the required amino acid, the RNA synthesis initiated by chloramphenicol recovers later than in that case where both an amino acid and chloramphenicol were used. However, in the latter case, a similar but shorter lag was also observed. They showed also that small concentrations of chloramphenicol are not effective to initiate the recovery in absence of the amino acid. In our experiments with vegetative phage DNA, we found no such lag, although the infective cells had been starved for 10-15 min. (We have also observed similar stringency and lack of a lag in phage infected bacteria starved for only 5 min.) 34Bendich, A., personal communication.