Translations:Vitamin B6/47/en
History
An overview of the history was published in 2012. In 1934, the Hungarian physician Paul György discovered a substance that was able to cure a skin disease in rats (dermatitis acrodynia). He named this substance vitamin B6, as numbering of the B vitamins was chronological, and pantothenic acid had been assigned vitamin B5 in 1931. In 1938, Richard Kuhn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on carotenoids and vitamins, specifically B2 and B6. Also in 1938, Samuel Lepkovsky isolated vitamin B6 from rice bran. A year later, Stanton A. Harris and Karl August Folkers determined the structure of pyridoxine and reported success in chemical synthesis, and then in 1942 Esmond Emerson Snell developed a microbiological growth assay that led to the characterization of pyridoxamine, the aminated product of pyridoxine, and pyridoxal, the formyl derivative of pyridoxine. Further studies showed that pyridoxal, pyridoxamine, and pyridoxine have largely equal activity in animals and owe their vitamin activity to the ability of the organism to convert them into the enzymatically active form pyridoxal-5-phosphate.