Industrial Biotechnology of Vitamins, Biopigments, and Antioxidants

Erick J. Vandamme, José Luis Revuelta

• Publisher: Wiley-VCH
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783527681778
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze biologiche
• Subtopic: Biotecnologia

Vitamins are a group of physiologically very important, chemically quite complex organic compounds, that are essential for humans and animals. Some vitamins and other growth factors behave as antioxidants, while some can be considered as biopigments. As their chemical synthesis is laborious, their biotechnology-based synthesis and production via microbial fermentation has gained substantial interest within the last decades. Recent progress in microbial genetics and in metabolic engineering and implementation of innovative bioprocess technology has led to a biotechnology-based industrial production of many vitamins and related compounds. Divided into three sections, this volume covers: 1. water-soluble vitamins
2. fat-soluble vitamin compounds and
3. other growth factors, biopigments, and antioxidants. They are all reviewed systematically: from natural occurrence and assays, via biosynthesis, strain development, to industrially-employed biotechnological syntheses and applications.

Chapter 1
Vitamins, Biopigments, Antioxidants and Related Compounds: A Historical, Physiological and (Bio)technological Perspective

Erick J. Vandamme and José L. Revuelta

1.1 Historical Aspects of the Search for Vitamins

In hindsight, the history of organic compounds that are now called vitamins can be traced back to the ancient Egyptians; they experienced that feeding animal liver to a person would help cure night blindness, an illness now known to be caused by vitamin A deficiency. About 400 BC, the Greek physician – and father of Western medicine – Hippocrates of Kos (460 to 370 BC) reported via his ‘Corpus Hippocraticum’ that eating liver could cure the same vision problem. Indeed, the value of eating certain foods to maintain health was thus recognised long before vitamins were ever identified (Bender, 2003).

In the thirteenth century, the Crusaders frequently suffered from scurvy, now known to be caused by a lack of vitamin C in their food (Carpenter, 2012). Scurvy was a particular deadly disease in which the tissue collagen is not properly formed, causing poor wound healing, bleeding of the gums, severe pain and, finally, death. It had also long since been a well-known disease, appearing towards mid-winter in Northern European countries. Much later, in the sixteenth century, the therapeutic effects of lemon juice against scurvy (then named scorbut) became gradually known during long sea and ocean discovery voyages. The disease name, scorbut, seems to be derived from the Old Nordic ‘skyr-bjugr’, meaning ‘sour milk-abscess’, believed to be caused by continuous use of sour milk or ‘skyr’ as main food on long sea journeys; the Medieval Latin term was scorbutus, later known as Sceurbuyck in French, Scheurbuyck in Dutch and scorbuicke in English and then as scorbut, but it is now known as scurvy. The chemical name of vitamin C, L-ascorbic acid, is actually derived from these old names (Davies, Austin and Partridge, 1991). Scurvy had caused the loss of most ship crew members on Vasco da Gama's journey rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1499 and those of Ferdinand Magellan during his first circumnavigation of our globe during 1519–1522. The Scottish physician James Lind, a pioneer in naval hygiene, studied this disease in 1747 and described, in 1753, in his book ‘A treatise of the scurvy’, the beneficial effect of eating fresh vegetables and citrus fruits in preventing it. He recommended that the British Royal Navy use lemons and limes to avoid scurvy; this led to the nickname ‘limeys’ for British sailors at that time. However, these findings were not widely practiced even by the Royal Navy's Arctic expeditions in the nineteenth century, where it was believed that scurvy could be prevented by practising good hygiene and exercise, rather than by a diet of fresh food. (Ant)Arctic expeditions thus continued to be plagued by scurvy and other deficiency diseases further into the twentieth century. The prevailing medical theory was that scurvy was caused by tainted canned foods!

For another nutritional deficiency disease (vitamin B₃ or niacin deficiency) already described for its dermatological effects in 1735 by Gaspar Casal in Spain, the Italian medical doctor Francesco Frapoli used the name pellagra (pelle = skin; agra = rough), referring to a rough skin appearance. Pellagra was common in people who obtained most of their food energy from maize, notably in the Americas, but also in Africa and China. Its emergence also depended on neglecting the once common practice of the ‘nixtamalisation’ process – a special method of milling the whole dried corn kernel – making niacin, bound as niacytin, nutritionally available in the kernel.

In the nineteenth century, in Japan, the Hikan child diseases (keratomalacia or necrosis of the cornea and xerophthalmia or eye dryness) were successfully treated by including cod liver oil, eel fat or chicken liver, as a source of vitamin A, in the diet. It was also found that cod liver oil and also direct sunlight had a curing effect on rickets (vitamin D deficiency), a disease already well described by the English physician Daniel Whistler in 1645 and based on earlier observations of his colleague Francis Glisson. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, t...