For much of the 19th century, scientists argued about how fermentation happens. Louis Pasteur showed that the fermentation of sugar is carried out by living yeast, and he believed it could only happen inside intact living cells.In 1897 Eduard Buchner ground yeast with sand and pressed out a cell-free extract. When he added sugar, it still fermented, producing ethanol and carbon dioxide. This showed that fermentation is caused by enzymes (which he called zymase), not by some 'vital force' of the living cell. Buchner won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1907, and his work helped to found biochemistry.Arthur Harden and William Young then studied the yeast juice. They found that:
• fermentation needed inorganic phosphate, which became bound to the sugar, and they identified a hexose bisphosphate intermediate;
• when the juice was separated by dialysis, neither fraction fermented sugar alone, but together they did. The large, heat-sensitive fraction contained the enzymes; the small, heat-stable fraction, 'cozymase', was later identified as NAD.Over the following decades, Gustav Embden, Otto Meyerhof and Jakub Parnas worked out each step, and by about 1940 the whole pathway was known. Glycolysis is still called the Embden-Meyerhof-Parnas pathway.Meyerhof also showed that the same pathway runs in muscle, producing lactate instead of ethanol. This is strong evidence that glycolysis is common to almost all organisms.
• fermentation needed inorganic phosphate, which became bound to the sugar, and they identified a hexose bisphosphate intermediate;
• when the juice was separated by dialysis, neither fraction fermented sugar alone, but together they did. The large, heat-sensitive fraction contained the enzymes; the small, heat-stable fraction, 'cozymase', was later identified as NAD.Over the following decades, Gustav Embden, Otto Meyerhof and Jakub Parnas worked out each step, and by about 1940 the whole pathway was known. Glycolysis is still called the Embden-Meyerhof-Parnas pathway.Meyerhof also showed that the same pathway runs in muscle, producing lactate instead of ethanol. This is strong evidence that glycolysis is common to almost all organisms.