Animal chemistry

Courtesy of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Sweden. 

The realization that the living organism is made up of a great number of individual proteins with different properties owed much to the discovery that they could be fractionated by taking advantage of their varying solubility in salt solutions of different concentrations. The pioneer here was the French biochemist Prosper Sylvain Denis (1799-1863) who in the 1850s published his results with salt fractionation of serum proteins. Salt fractionation became one of the most widely used methods for the separation of proteins and it remains a standard procedure to this day. 

It had been noted early on that proteins could be cleaved by acid or alkaline hydrolysis, yielding what was later called amino acids. Leucine was the first amino acid isolated after protein hydrolysis (1819) followed in 1820 by the simplest of all amino acids, glycine. A number of more or less brutal methods were used for the degradation of proteins but it was soon realized that acid hydrolysis was the least damaging to the desired end-products, the amino acids. In 1846 Liebig obtained crystals of the first aromatic amino acid, tyrosine. At the end of the 19th century, a dozen amino acids had been isolated in pure form, but the list of 20 standard amino acids in protein was not completed until 1936 when threonine was discovered. 

Nevertheless, the exciting world of biological macromolecules was slowly being revealed and shown to include, not only proteins but also a new class of molecules, the nucleic acids, which would eventually prove to have molecular weights many orders of magnitude greater than those that had seemed so shocking to Emil Fischer. 

---

On Pelouze, quoted in F. L. Holmes, Claude Bernard and Animal Chemistry The Emergence of a Scientist (Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1974) 77 and on Wurtz, in eloge for Dumas, CR, 1884, quoted in Klosterman, "A Research School of Chemistry," 45. 

Claude Bernard and Animal Chemistry The Emergence of a Scientist. Cambridge Harvard University Press,... 

Read up-to-date science news articles and do hands-on activities, puzzles, and games. Topics on the site include animals, chemistry, dinosaurs, the environment, health, space, and weather. 

Berzelius became interested in animal chemistry and its applications in medicine from the late eighteenth century. He began to lecture on the subject and in 1806-08 published a two-volume chemical textbook in Swedish based on his lectures. This was never translated into English and only limited parts of it became known in this... 

F. L. Holmes, Introduction to J. Liebig, Animal Chemistry or Organic Chemistry in its Application to Physiology and Pathology, trans. W. Gregory, Cambridge, 1842 Facsimile Ed., Johnson Reprint Corporation, New York and London, 1964. 

F. L. Holmes, Claude Bernard and Animal Chemistry, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1974. 

H. Mcllwain, Biochemistry and neurochemistry in the 1800s, their origins in comparative animal chemistry , Essays Biochem., 1990, 25, 197-224. 

Boger reported studies on palladium-mediated cyclization to form the CDE ring system of lavendamycin, as shown in Eq. (2) [74-76]. These reactions were conducted with stoichiometric amounts of [Pd(PPh3)4] (2). When used in a 1 mol% quantity, 2 failed to catalyze these reactions, presumably because of the absence of a base. Until almost 10 years later, no palladium-catalyzed animation chemistry was reported, and few citations of the early amination chemistry existed. 

Friedrich Woehler had read the recently published work of Chevreul who had shown that many of the fats and other substances occurring in both the animal and vegetable kingdoms were identical. The barrier between animal and vegetable matter had thus been broken down. He was familiar with the work on animal chemistry of Rouelle, magnetic teacher of Lavoisier. These men had taken the first steps. 

John Winthrop the Younger (1606 to 1676) was fond of minerals and made a hobby of collecting them. In a spring near his home in New London, Connecticut, he found a black rock, now known as columbite. His grandson sent this to Sir Hans Sloane (1660 to 1753) in London, who handed it over to the British Museum. There it lay until 1801 when Charles Hatchett examined it. Hatchett was the son of a prosperous London coach-builder in Long Acre, a well-known mineralogist and chemist, and one of the Founders of the Animal Chemistry Club (1809) which met alternately at the houses of Sir Everard Home and of Hatchett himself. He was working on some chromium minerals in the British Museum and concluded that this black mineral contained a new element, which he called columbium the mineral in consequence was later called columbite, as mentioned above. It subsequently transpired, however, that the columbium was not a simple element, but a mixture of two. The discovery was made in this way. 

---