Glutamine in the Growth of Lactic Acid Bacteria

It will be interesting, when a new history of biochemistry comes to be written, to trace the ways in which the social and economic importance of yeasts has stimulated, directly or indirectly, much scientific investigation which has had a major effect in developing our understanding of the fundamental biochemistry of living ma tter. 

The history of the discovery of pantothenic acid has been well documented elsewhere (424). 

The first indications of a single effective nutrilite for yeast growth were observed by Williams and co-workers (426, 432) in studies of the yeast bios problem. /3-Alanine was found to be a yeast nutrilite (430) before it was known to be part of the pantothenic acid molecule. 

Mueller (257, 265) found that -alanine was a growth factor required by certain strains of C. diphtheriae, and later Mueller and Klotz (266) found that the Allen strain of C. diphtheriae responded more readily to pantothenic acid concentrates than it did to the hydrolytic products of the latter, or to an approximately equivalent quantity of 3-alanine, R. J. Williams having suggested that pantothenic acid was a compound of j9-alanine and a hydroxy acid in amide linkage. This was then demonstrated directly (404) 

The structure of the non-nitrogenous part of pantothenic acid was re-poited as an a-hydroxy-y-lactone (247) and finally found to be a-hy-droxy-/3,j3-dimethyl-7-butyrolactone (pantoic lactone) (372, 427). Synthe- 

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