Shedding light on the dark reactions: Hatch and Slack and C4 photosynthesis

Some 40 years ago almost to the month, Hatch and Slack1 reported in the Biochemical Journal that the initial reactions of CO2 fixation in some plants were significantly different from those recently accepted to describe the general process of photosynthetic carbon assimilation. Their observations that C4 dicarboxylic acids were the initial products of assimilation rather than 3-phosphoglycerate confounded established assertions. This work, and subsequent papers that emerged, made a huge impact, both biochemical and physiological, on the field of photosynthesis.