Vital amines

Our word vitamin was coined m 1912 m the belief that the substances present m the diet that prevented scurvy pellagra beriberi rickets and other diseases were vital amines In many cases that belief was confirmed certain vitamins did prove to be amines In many other cases however vitamins were not amines Nevertheless the name vitamin entered our language and stands as a reminder that early chemists recognized the crucial place occupied by amines m biological processes... 

The term vitamin is a misnomer, the name means vital amines, and while vitamins are essential for life they are not, as was originally supposed, amines. Most vitamins were discovered as a result of a deficiency disease produced by a restricted diet. Long voyages on sailing ships with a diet composed of ship s biscuit, dried beans, dried peas and salted meat produced scurvy. In the worst cases the whole crew were affected, but the ship s officers tended to be less severely affected. 

In 1912 a Polish scientist C. Frank pubhshed a paper in Journal of Physiology, in which he also reported an extracted compormd from rice bran with the same procedrrre as Srrzrrki reported and rramed the extracted substance Vitamin (which means vital amine). The comporrrrd is the same as that found by Srrzrrki. The Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology in 1929 was awarded to C. Eijkman and F. G. Hopkirrs for their discovery and contributiorrs to Vitamin, but it is obvious that the discoverer of Vitamin is SrrzuM. Vitamin A was isolated in 1914, fom years after the discovery of Oryzanin Vitamin Bf... 

There has, in recent years, been some debate about the need to take vitamin tablets. Vitamin is a compound word derived from vital amines . The vitamins are a range of essential chemicals needed by our body. They were given letters of the alphabet in the order they were discovered and the letters bear no relationship to their structures... 

Vitamins are essential organic compounds that the human body cannot synthesize by itself and must therefore, be present in the diet. The term vitamin (vital amines) was coined by Casmir Funk from the Latin vita meaning "life" (essential for life) and amine because he thought that all of these compounds contained an amine functional group. 

Vitamins are substances essential for a healthy life humans must ingest vitamins via their diet because there is no mechanism for their biosynthesis in the body. There are 14 vitamins - the name was coined when the first vitamin chemically identified (vitamin Bi in 1910) turned out to be an amine - a vital amine. A typical vitamin is folic acid, a complex molecule in which the functionally important unit is the bicyclic pyrazino[2,3- f pyrimidine (pteridine) ring system, and its arylaminomethyl substituent. Folic acid is converted in the body into tetrahydrofolic acid (FH4) which is crucial in carrying one-carbon units, at various oxidation levels, for example in the biosynthesis of purines, and is mandatory for healthy development of the foetus during pregnancy. Other essential co-factors that contain pteridine units must and can be biosynthesised in humans - without them we cannot survive - aud are incorporated into oxygen-transfer enzymes based on molybdenum, in which the metal is liganded by a complex ene-dithiolate. 

It was appreciated in the early part of the twentieth century that a diet containing the correct amounts of carbohydrate, fats, and protein was insufficient for good health. Other accessory food factors were required. The initially identified accessory substances were amines, and so these vital amines were called vitamines. When it became clear that not all accessory substances were amines, the name became vitamins. 

This substance was also reported under the name oryzanine in 1912 by the same investigator. The name oryzanine is derived from the scientific name of the rice plant Oryza sativa) [8,9].This material was effective for the treatment of multiple neuritis in chickens. At that time, although no chemical description of the active component was given, it was reported that unmilled rice was effective in treating the symptoms of beriberi [10]. In the meantime, a substance effective for the disease known as birds polished rice syndrome was obtained by C. Funk et al. at the Lister Laboratory in London in 1911-1912, and it was discovered that a substance that showed the same effect was also present in brewer s yeast. It was reported that the active substance contained nitrogen atom(s), was shown to be basic, and was regarded as a kind of amine. From these points of view, this amine was named vitamine ([Pg.205]

About this time the term vitamines , derived from vital amines , was coined by Funk to describe these accessory food factors, which he thought contained amino-nitrogen. It is now known that only a few of these substances contain amino-nitrogen and the word has been shortened to vitamins, a term that has been generally accepted as a group name. 

He believed, wrongly, that they all contained an amine (-NH2) group, and suggested they be called vital amines or vitamines. This was later amended to vitamins. ... 

As can be seen from Table 11.4, the vitamins are named in a curious way. This is a historical accident, and results from the way in which they were discovered. Studies at the beginning of the twentieth century showed that there was something in milk that was essential, in very small amounts, for the growth of animals fed on a diet consisting of purified fat, carbohydrate, protein and mineral salts. Two factors were found to be essential one was found in the cream and the other in the watery part of milk. Logically, they were called factor A (fat-soluble, in the cream) and factor B (water-soluble, in the watery part of the milk). Factor B was identified chemically as an amine, and in 1913 the name vitamin was coined for these vital amines . 

Eijkman, to travel to Indonesia to investigate the problem. Working in Java, he showed within 6 years that beriberi was a nutritional problem and that a paralytic condition closely resembling the polyneuritic symptoms of beriberi could be produced in chickens by feeding them both stale and freshly cooked polished rice. However, it was Funk in 1911 who first reported the isolation of a vital amine from rice polishings that had anti-beriberi properties. Funk was the first person to coin the word vitamine as a substance essential for life. The structure and synthesis of thiamin were reported in 1936. 

In 1913, E.V. McCollum isolated a yellow, fat-soluble substance from egg yolks that was critical for animal growth. He called it fat-soluble A, indicating the first isolated of several dietary microconstituents emerging as obligatory for vertebrate life and health. Later, fat-soluble A was renamed vitamin A, derived from the terminology vital amine, coined by Casmir Funk to describe these obligatory micronutrients. 

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