The production of amines by bacteria

Abstract

ACKERM.ANN [1910; 1911], in work on bacterial putrefaction, showed that amines can be formed from certain amino-acids by mixed cultures of organisms.His method was to inoculate a synthetic medium, containing salts, peptone, glucose and an amino-acid, with decomposing pancreas and then after an incubation of some weeks to isolate the amine from this medium.Thus he demonstrated the formation of putrescine and 8-aminovaleric acid from arginine, of histamine, cadaverine, y-aminobutyric acid and ,B-alanine from their corresponding amino- acids.This work is typical of the early investigations on bacterial amine formation [Ellinger, 1900; Abderhalden et al. 1913] showing the formation of such substances without giving information as to the processes, organisms or enzymes involved.Later work has been concerned with the amines formed by pure strains of identified organisms, in particular those isolated from the intestine.Thus Berthelot & Bertrand [1911; 1912] isolated a "Bacillus aminophilus intestinalis" which proved capable of the formation of histamine, tryptamine and tyramine.Strains of Bact. coli and Proteu8 vulgaris form tyramine from tyrosine [Sasaki, 1914] and isoamylamine from leucine [Arai, 1921].The formation of putrescine from arginine by Bact. coli has been reported by Akasi [1938] and Hirai [1936], while the formation of histamine from histidine has been the subject of many papers [Mellanby & Twort, 1912; Kendall & Gebauer, 1930; Hirai, 1933; Matsuda, 1933].The technique in most of this work is the inoculation of a synthetic medium containing salts, the amino-acid in question and either glycerol or carbohydrate, with a pure strain of the organism.This is followed by a lengthy incubation and chemical isolation of the amine produced.This method is usually not quantitative and the long incubation may entail considerable variations in the enzymic make-up of the organisms as the constitution of the