Читать книгу Plant Nucleotide Metabolism - Hiroshi Ashihara - Страница 13

Studies on purines and pyrimidines began in 1776 when the Swedish pharmacist Carl Wilhelm Scheele isolated uric acid from bladder stones. In 1846, Unger isolated guanine from the guano of Peruvian sea birds. At the end of the nineteenth century, several purines (adenine, xanthine, and hypoxanthine) and pyrimidines (thymine, cytosine, and uracil) were discovered by the German biochemist, Albrecht Kossel who believed they constituted the main part of cell nuclei. In 1874 Friedrich Miescher isolated nuclear material rich in phosphorus which he called ‘nuclein’. In the same period, Emil Fischer (1884) elucidated the structures of caffeine and related compounds which he confirmed by chemical synthesis. Further information can be found in a historical survey by Burnstock and Verkhratsky (2012). The pyridine nucleotide, NAD was discovered by the British biochemists Arthur Harden and William John Young in the early twentieth century (Harden and Young 1906).