Abstract
The dominance of nucleic acids and molecular biology in contemporary biochemistry tends to obscure the fact that biological and chemical knowledge of the purines substantially predated their discovery as nucleic acid constituents and can be traced back over 200 years. The first of these compounds to be isolated was uric acid (1) obtained by Scheele and Bergman in 1776 from bird excreta, human urine and urinary calculi. Undoubtedly this early discovery was greatly facilitated by the relatively low solubility of uric acid and hence its tendency to crystallize easily from biological fluids and extracts. Interest in the chemistry of urinary calculi also led Marcet, some forty years later, to the discovery of xanthine (2). Guanine (3) was isolated by Magnus in 1844 from guano, hence the name, and this discovery was followed in 1850 by Scherer’s isolation of hypoxanthine (4) from beef spleen. The last of the commonly occurring purines to be discovered was adenine (5) obtained by Kossel in 1885-6 from beef pancreas.
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Brown, E.G. (1998). Purines. In: Ring Nitrogen and Key Biomolecules. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4906-8_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4906-8_6
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