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Pyrimidines

  • Chapter
Ring Nitrogen and Key Biomolecules

Abstract

Although today the term ‘pyrimidine’ immediately brings to mind the nucleic acid bases uracil, cytosine and thymine, the first naturally occur­ring pyrimidine to be isolated was in fact a plant secondary product, vicine (1). This pyrimidine glucoside was isolated from seeds of Vicia sativa by Ritthausen in 1870 and later from several other species of Vicia, but it was not until more than eighty years later that its structure was elucidated (Bendich and Clements, 1953). Vicine is nearly always accompanied in Nature by a closely related pyrimidine glucoside, also discovered by Ritthausen (1881) and named by him convicine. The structure of convicine (2) was elucidated, much later again, by Bien et al. (1968).

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  1. School of Biological Sciences, University of Wales Swansea, UK

    E. G. Brown (Professor of Biochemistry)

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© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Brown, E.G. (1998). Pyrimidines. In: Ring Nitrogen and Key Biomolecules. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4906-8_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4906-8_5

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-010-6058-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-011-4906-8

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