Abstract
IN an address to the Birmingham University Biochemical Society, on December 9, Dr. Leslie Harris, of the Cambridge Nutritional Laboratory, referred to the findings in some current work on the chemical nature of the pellagra-prevent ing factor. Dr. Harris said that the suggestion of a connexion between nicotinic acid and ‘vitamin B’ is not a new one. About twenty-four years ago, Funk in England and Suzuki in Japan succeeded in isolating nicotinic acid from active ‘anti-neuritic’ concentrates, and it was once supposed that nicotinic acid might in some way be related to vitamin B1. But later investigations proved conclusively that pure nicotinic acid itself had no anti-neuritic action, and there the matter was left for some years, although the possible physiological importance of nicotinic acid was emphasized by the discovery of Euler that the acid amide of nicotinic acid is a component of cozymase. Recently, however, it has been found that nicotinic acid or its amide has a growth-promoting action for certain micro-organisms (Knight, Mueller, Holiday), and for pigeons or rats kept on various diets deficient in some portion of the B2 complex (Funk and Funk ; Frost and Elvehjem). Special importance attached to the statement of Elvehjem and his co-workers that nicotinic acid or its amide was curative of ‘blacktongue’ in dogs ; and work has now been done to link these new results with observations made at the Cambridge Nutritional Laboratory a year or so back. Here experiments by Birch, Gyorgy and Harris showed that what had hitherto been called ‘vitamin B2’ consisted in reality of three distinct factors, namely, lactoflavin, vitamin B6 (the ‘rat dermatitis factor') and the pellagra-preventing (P.P.) factor proper. The latter appeared to be identical with the ‘anti-blacktongue’ factor for dogs. More recently, Harris confirmed these results as to the tripartite nature of the ‘vitamin B2’ complex and showed furthermore that monkeys also developed a disease ('monkey pellagra') analogous with human pellagra when restricted to a diet deficient in the P.P. factor but containing the other known constituents of the B2 complex.
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Nicotinic Acid and the Pellagra-Preventing Vitamin. Nature 140, 1070 (1937). https://doi.org/10.1038/1401070a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1401070a0
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