Supplementary Figure S1. History of NAD+: Beer and Five Nobel Prize Laureates

Supplementary data

Supplementary Figure S1. History of NAD+: Beer and Five Nobel Prize Laureates

Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide consists of the oxidized form, NAD+, and its reduced form NADH. The discovery of NAD+ can be traced back to over one hundred years ago, when scientists were working on the mechanisms of alcoholic fermentation. In 1896, Dr. Eduard Buchner (1907 Nobel prize in chemistry, for his discovery of non-cellular fermentation) purified an enzyme he called “Zymase” that catalyzed the fermentation reaction [1]. In 1906, Dr. Arthur Harden and colleague William John Young discovered that a heat-stable co-factor in addition to the heat-sensitive “Zymase” were necessary for fermentation. Harden and Young named this critical co-factor “coferment"/”cozymase” [2]. Dr. Hans von Euler-Chelpin began in 1923 to study cozymase and later identified it as a nucleotide sugar phosphate that is now known to be NAD+ [3]. In 1929, Harden and Euler-Chelpin shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for their investigations on the fermentation of sugar and fermentative enzymes” [3]. In 1931, Dr. Otto Warburg (1931 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine) and colleagues discovered a “hydrogen transferring coenzyme” with three moles of phosphate, which was later identified as NADP+ [4]. Compared with NAD+, NADP+ has one additional phosphate group, the position of which was identified in 1950 by Arthur Kornberg (1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine) [5].

1. Nobel Lectures, C.-. (1966 (https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1907/buchner-facts.html)) Eduard Bunchner-Facts, Elsevier Publishing Company.

2. Harden, A. and Young, W.J. (1906) The alcoholic ferment of yeast-juice. Part II.-The coferment of yeast-juice. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B (78), 369-375.

3. James, L.K. (1993) Nobel Laureates in Chemistry 1901-1992, Merck& Co., Inc. .

4. P.D., B. (1970) The enzymes (Third edition), Academic Press.

5. Kornberg, A. and Pricer, W.E., Jr. (1950) On the structure of triphosphopyridine nucleotide. J Biol Chem 186 (2), 557-67.