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How did Eduard Buchner demonstrate that yeast cells contain substances that catalyze fermentation?
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reaction mechanism
Possible energy diagram for the dissociation of a covalent molecule, E–N, into its ions E+ and N− (see text).
In 1897, the German chemist Eduard Buchner demonstrated that fermentation is driven by chemical substances rather than the living yeast cell itself.12
He achieved this by extracting a "press juice" from yeast cells. Buchner showed that this cell-free extract contained an enzyme, which he named zymase, that was capable of catalyzing the breakdown of sugar into carbon dioxide and alcohol. This discovery was a landmark in biochemistry, as it reduced a complex biological process to a nonliving system of enzymes, effectively challenging the prevailing view that such transformations required intact, living organisms.21