Historical Background
CAM was first suspected by De Saussure in 1804 in his Recherches Chimiques sur la Vegetation, confirmed and refined by Aubert, E. in 1892 in his Recherches physiologiques sur les plantes grasses and expounded upon by Richards, H. M. 1915 in Acidity and Gas Interchange in Cacti, Carnegie Institution. The term CAM may have been coined by Ranson and Thomas in 1940, but they were not the first to discover this cycle. It was observed by the botanists Ranson and Thomas, in the Crassulaceae family of succulents (which includes jade plants and Sedum). Its name refers to acid metabolism in Crassulaceae, not the metabolism of crassulacean acid.
Read more about this topic: Crassulacean Acid Metabolism
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