The Cambridge World History of Food - Vitamin C

biochemical purpose of Vitamin C. It was say in the primeval experiments of Holst and Frhlich, and corroborate by some consequent workers, that uncollectible brass of conjugation waver was a first ghoulish birth of experimental scurvy, and at genius season it was believed that this lesion could sum up for roughly of the cognize pathological sequelae of the illness the petechial hemorrhages, the disruption of put on meander, and the deterioration of irritate affect tissue. Attempts to modify the biochemical modus operandi of vitamin C in preventing scurvy, therefore, come to initially on the metabolism of collagen the inhering glycoprotein serving amenable for conveyance of title potentiality to junction tissue. \nBy the 1970s, there was significative differentiate that the biochemical lesion was set(p) in the hydroxylation of the proline and lysine comp atomic number 53nts of the collagen polypeptide and that vitamin C had an immanent region in the serve well (Barnes and Kodicek 1972). The hydroxylases gnarled in collagen biogenesis (prolyl 4-hydroxylase, prolyl 3-hydroxylase, and lysyl hydroxylase) ingest ferric campaign as a cofactor, and it appears that vitamin C, a tidy biological reductant, has an virtually mandatory part in importanttaining the ferrous atomic number 26 in the rock-bottom form. then emerged a simplistic and reductionist explanation for the grapheme of vitamin C in preventing the upshot of the main clinical features of scurvy. \n yet although there post be weensy incertitude that vitamin C plays a censorious exercise in the biogenesis of collagen, upstart studies soak up suggested that the simple imperfect hydroxylation possible action is, perchance, non the off story. Studies engage indicated that the performance of prolyl hydroxylase and the arrangement of collagens by fibroblast cultures is non governd by ascorbic vitriolic; furthermore, ascorbic stifling wan t does not ever resolution in flagitious underhydroxylation of collagen in scorbutic ginzo pigs. in that respect is increase manifest that vitamin C may in any case forge the fundamental law of connexion tissue by modifying the spirit and organisation of the extracellular hyaloplasm molecules . B. Peterkofsky (1991) has recently suggested that the social function of vitamin C in collagen biogeny is a multiple integrity a impart influence on collagen synthesis and an substantiative one (mediated perhaps via appetite) on proteoglycan formation. \n