The Arnon–Buchanan cycle: a retrospective, 1966–2016

For the first decade following its description in 1954, the Calvin–Benson cycle was considered the sole pathway of autotrophic CO2 assimilation. In the early 1960s, experiments with fermentative bacteria uncovered reactions that challenged this concept. Ferredoxin was found to donate electrons directly for the reductive fixation of CO2 into alpha-keto acids via reactions considered irreversible. Thus, pyruvate and alpha-ketoglutarate could be synthesized from CO2, reduced ferredoxin and acetyl-CoA or succinyl-CoA, respectively. This work opened the door to the discovery that reduced ferredoxin could drive the Krebs citric acid cycle in reverse, converting the pathway from its historical role in carbohydrate breakdown to one fixing CO2. Originally uncovered in photosynthetic green sulfur bacteria, the Arnon–Buchanan cycle has since been divorced from light and shown to function in a variety of anaerobic chemoautotrophs. In this retrospective, colleagues who worked on the cycle at its inception in 1966 and those presently working in the field trace its development from a controversial reception to its present-day inclusion in textbooks. This pathway is now well established in major groups of chemoautotrophic bacteria, instead of the Calvin–Benson cycle, and is increasingly referred to as the Arnon–Buchanan cycle. In this retrospective, separate sections have been written by the authors indicated. Bob Buchanan wrote the abstract and the concluding comments.