How did Eduard Buchner show that yeast enzymes can ferment sugar outside living cells?

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Eduard Buchner demonstrated that fermentation is a chemical process driven by enzymes rather than the living yeast cell itself. In his research conducted during 1896 and 1897, he successfully extracted a substance from yeast cells, which he named zymase.1

He showed that this cell-free extract could catalyze the breakdown of sugar into carbon dioxide and alcohol. This discovery was significant because it proved that the biochemical activity of fermentation could occur outside of a living organism, fundamentally changing the understanding of biochemistry and earning him the 1907 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.1