Читать книгу Molecular Mechanisms of Photosynthesis - Robert E. Blankenship - Страница 47

When the overall reaction of photosynthesis had been established, attention turned to elucidating the details of the mechanism of the process. The early ideas in this regard were erroneous and much too simplistic. Richard Willstätter (1872–1942) and Arthur Stoll (1887–1971) proposed in 1918 that the product was actually formed directly as a molecular species, formaldehyde (CH₂O), in a direct, concerted process involving chlorophyll, CO₂, and H₂O. This view was revived later by Otto Warburg (1883–1970) in support of his unorthodox formulation of photosynthesis, which we will discuss a little later. We now know that these mechanistic ideas, which were certainly reasonable at the time, are not valid, because there are literally dozens of intermediate states that have been identified, and the reduction in CO₂ can be separated from the production of oxygen, and vice versa. The key to understanding in more detail how the mechanism of photosynthesis really works came from the analysis of simple photosynthetic organisms by van Niel and by Hill's experiments showing that CO₂ reduction and O₂ evolution can be decoupled.