Lactose, or milk sugar, is a disaccharide composed of galactose and glucose and has the molecular formula C12H22O11. Lactose makes up around 2–8% of milk (by mass). The name comes from lact (gen. lactis), the Latin word for milk, plus the suffix -ose used to name sugars. The compound is a white, water-soluble, non-hygroscopic solid with a mildly sweet taste. It is used in the food industry.
A diastase is any one of a group of enzymes that catalyses the breakdown of starch into maltose. For example, the diastase α-Amylase degrades starch to a mixture of the disaccharide maltose; the trisaccharide maltotriose, which contains three α (1-4)-linked glucose residues; and oligosaccharides, known as dextrins, that contain the α (1-6)-linked glucose branches.
Anselme Payen was a French chemist known for discovering the enzyme diastase, and the carbohydrate cellulose.
Asparagine is an α-amino acid that is used in the biosynthesis of proteins. It contains an α-amino group, an α-carboxylic acid group, and a side chain carboxamide, classifying it as a polar, aliphatic amino acid. It is non-essential in humans, meaning the body can synthesize it. It is encoded by the codons AAU and AAC.
Pierre Eugène Marcellin Berthelot was a French chemist and Republican politician noted for the Thomsen–Berthelot principle of thermochemistry. He synthesized many organic compounds from inorganic substances, providing a large amount of counter-evidence to the theory of Jöns Jakob Berzelius that organic compounds required organisms in their synthesis. Berthelot was convinced that chemical synthesis would revolutionize the food industry by the year 2000, and that synthesized foods would replace farms and pastures. "Why not", he asked, "if it proved cheaper and better to make the same materials than to grow them?"
Maltose, also known as maltobiose or malt sugar, is a disaccharide formed from two units of glucose joined with an α(1→4) bond. In the isomer isomaltose, the two glucose molecules are joined with an α(1→6) bond. Maltose is the two-unit member of the amylose homologous series, the key structural motif of starch. When beta-amylase breaks down starch, it removes two glucose units at a time, producing maltose. An example of this reaction is found in germinating seeds, which is why it was named after malt. Unlike sucrose, it is a reducing sugar.
In stereochemistry, mutarotation is the change in optical rotation of a chiral material in a solution due to a change in proportion of the two constituent anomers until equilibrium is reached. Cyclic sugars show mutarotation as α and β anomeric forms interconvert. The optical rotation of the solution depends on the optical rotation of each anomer and their ratio in the solution.
Louis Augustin Guillaume Bosc was a French botanist, invertebrate zoologist, and entomologist.
Ferdinand Frédéric Henri Moissan was a French chemist and pharmacist who won the 1906 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in isolating fluorine from its compounds. Moissan was one of the original members of the International Atomic Weights Committee.
Antoine-Augustin Parmentier was a French pharmacist and agronomist, best remembered as a vocal promoter of the potato as a food source for humans in France and throughout Europe. His many other contributions to nutrition and health included establishing the first mandatory smallpox vaccination campaign and pioneering the extraction of sugar from sugar beets. Parmentier also founded a school of breadmaking and studied methods of conserving food, including refrigeration.
Phoebus Aaron Theodore Levene was a Russian-born American biochemist who studied the structure and function of nucleic acids. He characterized the different forms of nucleic acid, DNA from RNA, and found that DNA contained adenine, guanine, thymine, cytosine, deoxyribose, and a phosphate group.
In carbohydrate chemistry, the Lobry de Bruyn–Van Ekenstein transformation also known as the Lobry de Bruyn–Alberda van Ekenstein transformation is the base or acid catalyzed transformation of an aldose into the ketose isomer or vice versa, with a tautomeric enediol as reaction intermediate. Ketoses may be transformed into 3-ketoses, etcetera. The enediol is also an intermediate for the epimerization of an aldose or ketose.
Weerman degradation, also named Weerman reaction, is a name reaction in organic chemistry. It is named after Rudolf Adrian Weerman, who discovered it in 1910. In general, it is an organic reaction in carbohydrate chemistry in which amides are degraded by sodium hypochlorite, forming an aldehyde with one less carbon. Some have regarded it as an extension of the Hofmann rearrangement.
The history of biochemistry can be said to have started with the ancient Greeks who were interested in the composition and processes of life, although biochemistry as a specific scientific discipline has its beginning around the early 19th century. Some argued that the beginning of biochemistry may have been the discovery of the first enzyme, diastase, in 1833 by Anselme Payen, while others considered Eduard Buchner's first demonstration of a complex biochemical process alcoholic fermentation in cell-free extracts to be the birth of biochemistry. Some might also point to the influential work of Justus von Liebig from 1842, Animal chemistry, or, Organic chemistry in its applications to physiology and pathology, which presented a chemical theory of metabolism, or even earlier to the 18th century studies on fermentation and respiration by Antoine Lavoisier.
Pierre Jean Robiquet was a French chemist. He laid founding work in identifying amino acids, the fundamental building blocks of proteins. He did this through recognizing the first of them, asparagine, in 1806, in the industry's adoption of industrial dyes, with the identification of alizarin in 1826, and in the emergence of modern medications, through the identification of codeine in 1832, an opiate alkaloid substance of widespread use with analgesic and antidiarrheal properties.
Léon-Gervais-Marie Maquenne was a French chemist and plant physiologist born in Paris.
Jean-Baptiste Senderens was a French priest and chemist. He was one of the pioneers of catalytic chemistry, and a co-discoverer of catalytic hydrogenation, a process used commercially to make margarine.
Frédéric Alphonse Musculus, born on July 16, 1829, in Soultz-sous-Forêts and died on May 26, 1888, in Strasbourg, was a French chemist.
Gustave-Augustin Quesneville was a French chemist, chemical manufacturer, and journal editor, best known for the monthly Moniteur Scientifique Du Docteur Quesneville.
Louis Philibert Claude James Chappuis was a French chemist and physicist.
