Fringe biochemistry among microbes

Abstract

The principle of the Unity of Biochemistry is one of the few stable dogmas of this century. It crystallizes the belief, based now on the examination of a wide variety of living species, that terrestrial biochemistry is much the same whatever living creature is examined. Examples need not be given in detail: they include the basic uniformity of the glycolytic pathway; the near-universality of the genetic code and of the respiratory chain sequence; the near-uniformity of the monomers of cell constituents, even to their optical rotation; the universality of ATP as ‘ quantum ’ of biological energy.