Thiamine - History

History

Thiamine was the first of the water-soluble vitamins to be described, leading to the discovery of more such trace compounds essential for survival and to the notion of vitamin.

In 1884, Kanehiro Takaki (1849–1920), a surgeon general in the Japanese navy, rejected the previous germ theory for beriberi and hypothesized that the disease was due to insufficiencies in the diet instead. Switching diet on a navy ship, he discovered that substituting a diet of white rice only, with one also containing barley, meat, milk, bread, and vegetables nearly eliminated beriberi on a 9-month sea voyage. However, Takaki had added many foods to the successful diet and he incorrectly attributed the benefit to increased nitrogen intake, as vitamins were unknown substances at the time. Nor was the Navy convinced of the need for so expensive a program of dietary improvement, and many men continued to die of beriberi, even during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5. Not until 1905, after the anti-beriberi factor had been discovered in rice bran (removed by polishing into white rice) and in brown barley rice, was Takaki's experiment rewarded by making him a baron in the Japanese peerage system, after which he was affectionately called "Barley Baron."

The specific connection to grain was made in 1897 by Christiaan Eijkman (1858–1930), a military doctor in the Dutch Indies, discovered that fowl fed on a diet of cooked, polished rice developed paralysis, which could be reversed by discontinuing rice polishing. He attributed beriberi to a nerve poison in the endosperm of rice, from which the outer layers of the grain gave protection to the body. An associate, Gerrit Grijns (1865–1944), correctly interpreted the connection between excessive consumption of polished rice and beriberi in 1901: He concluded that rice contains an essential nutrient in the outer layers of the grain that is removed by polishing.

Eijkman was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1929, because his observations led to the discovery of vitamins. These compounds were named by Casimir Funk. In 1911, Casimir Funk isolated the antineuritic substance from rice bran that he called a "vitamine" (on account of its containing an amino group). Dutch chemists, Barend Coenraad Petrus Jansen (1884–1962) and his closest collaborator Willem Frederik Donath (1889–1957), went on to isolate and crystallize the active agent in 1926, whose structure was determined by Robert Runnels Williams (1886–1965), a US chemist, in 1934. Thiamine (“sulfur-containing vitamin”) was synthesized in 1936 by the same group.

Thiamine was first named "aneurin" (for anti-neuritic vitamin). Sir Rudolph Peters, in Oxford, introduced thiamine-deprived pigeons as a model for understanding how thiamine deficiency can lead to the pathological-physiological symptoms of beriberi. Indeed, feeding the pigeons upon polished rice leads to an easily recognizable behavior of head retraction, a condition called opisthotonos. If not treated, the animal will die after a few days. Administration of thiamine at the stage of opithotonos will lead to a complete cure of the animal within 30 min. As no morphological modifications were observed in the brain of the pigeons before and after treatment with thiamine, Peeters introduced the concept of biochemical lesion

When Lohman and Schuster (1937) showed that the diphosphorylated thiamine derivative (thiamine diphosphate, ThDP) was a cofactor required for the oxydative decarboxylation of pyruvate, (a reaction now known to be catalyzed by pyruvate dehydrogenase), the mechanism of action of thiamine in the cellular metabolism seemed to be elucidated. At present, this view seems to be oversimplified: Pyruvate dehydrogenase is only one of several enzymes requiring thiamine diphosphate as a cofactor; moreover, other thiamine phosphate derivatives have been discovered since then, and they may also contribute to the symptoms observed during thiamine deficiency.

Finally, the mechanism by which the thiamine moiety of ThDP exerts its coenzyme function by proton substitution on position 2 of the thiazoliumring was elucidated by Ronald Breslow in 1958.