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Assay-guided isolation of naturally-occurring neuroactive substances1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2009

Henry McIlwain
Henry McIlwain*
Affiliation:
Department of Biochemistry, St Thomas' Hospital Medical School, London
*
2 Address for correspondence: Dr H. Mcllwain, Department of Biochemistry, St Thomas' Hospital Medical School, Lambeth Palace Road, London SEI 7EH.
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Synopsis

Ways in which chemical techniques could be applied to the understanding of neural systems, their functioning and their disorders were devised only gradually during the present century. In a particularly successful procedure, now termed assay-guided isolation, neural defects were made good by means of tissue-extracts and the restoration of function was established as an assay-system to guide the chemical separation and identification of the active tissue constituent. Thiamin was so isolated, using an experimental polyneuritis assay; subsequent instances among other metabolites, hormones, neurotransmitters and nerve growth factors are recounted. Procedures of assay-guided characterization ensured that links were retained between specific, sparsely-occurring substances and chosen aspects of their biological roles while their chemical nature was first explored and then established. The procedures discouraged the too-facile postulating of hypothetical molecules and contributed to the distinctiveness of neurochemistry as a subject within the neurosciences.

Type
Research Article
Information
Psychological Medicine , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , February 1985 , pp. 15 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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Footnotes

1

This paper was presented in brief at the Colloquium on the History of Neurochemistry at the 9th (Vancouver) meeting of the International Society for Neurochemistry, 1983.

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