VI. Studies on Autodigestion. Digestion of Living Tissues by Trypsin

Summary

The legs of living pithed frogs immersed for a short period of time in HCl or pepsin-HCl without any visible digestion resulting therefrom, can then be digested by trypsin. Primary exposure of the frogs legs to pepsin-HCl induces a shorter subsequent tryptic digestion time than primary exposure to HCl alone. Therefore, “peptonisation” 11 must play an important rôle in the preparation of these tissues for tryptic digestion. The above experiments demonstrate that tryptic digestion of living tissues can take place under appropriate conditions.