History of gluten

About 10,000 years ago in Asia, grains first began to be cultivated by humans. Hunting and gathering gave way to farming. Early forms of wheat are believed to have been cultivated at least as early as 9000 BC. Gluten appeared as a consequence of agricultural practices initiated 10000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent of southwest Asia.

Gluten is a protein naturally found in some grains. Gluten is a Latin word that means “glue,” due to its ability to hold grains like wheat, barley, and rye together.

After 8000 BC, the cultivation of wheat – particularly emmer wheat – began spreading to other parts of the world, hitting Greece, Cyprus, and India by 6500 BC; and Germany by 5000 BC. It wasn’t until the 19th century that wheat was milled in large quantities and gluten assumed a more prominent place in the diet.

The Greek physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia wrote the first account of the disease around the first century AD. He described patients whose food passed through them without being digested, calling the disease the coeliac diathesis, stemming from the Greek word ‘koalia’, meaning abdomen.

For centuries afterward, the diagnosis served as a death sentence, as no one knew the cause or any treatment. Gluten was discovered by Jacopo Bartolomeo Beccari, in Bologna (Italy) in 1728. However, the lixiviation process still used today to get gluten and the chemical characterization of this new material was performed by the physician Johannes Kesselmeyer in Strasbourg (France), in 1759.

It was only in the 20th century that celiac disease was truly discovered and named by the medical community.

Multiple diets were used to treat celiac disease until 1953, when Dicke, Weijers, and van de Kamer identified gluten as the cause of the symptoms. Coeliac disease was actually discovered all the way back in the 1940’s by physician Willem Dicke. Dicke was the medical director at a children’s hospital and became increasingly interested in coeliac disease after attending a presentation on it back in 1932
History of gluten

Discovery of protein and amino acid

The early history of protein metabolism and nutrition is closely tied to the discovery of nitrogen and its distribution in nature.

Daniel Rutherford, in Edinburgh, can be regarded as the discoverer of nitrogen, which he called ‘phlogisticated air’ in his doctoral dissertation of Doctorate of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh in Medicine thesis in 1772.

Rutherford showed that the gas was incapable of supporting life or flame, work later extended by the French chemist Lavoisier.

In 1789, The French chemist Antoine Fourcroy recognized three distinct varieties of protein from animal sources: albumin, fibrin, and gelatin.

In 1806 Louis Nicolas Vauquelin, a French chemist, isolated asparagines, a compound in asparagus a that turned out to be the first amino acid occurring in protein to be discovered. While the second amino acid cystine was discovered by William Hyde Wallaston in 1810. The discovery of all amino acids ending with discovery of threonine in 1935.

The association between protein quality and amino acid composition was first shown by Willcock and Hopkins in 1906 when they postulated the essentiality of tryptophan.

The term protein was invented by the Swedish chemistry Jons Jakob Berzelius (1779-1848). The name is derived from the Greek word πρωτεῖος which mean ‘standing in front’, ‘in the lead’.

Berzelius justified the name in a letter to Gerrit Mulder, Dutch physician and chemist, dated 10 July 1838. 

Protein purification began in the first half of the nineteenth century upon the discovery of the first proteins: albumin, hemoglobin, casein, pepsin, fibrin and crystalline.
Discovery of protein and amino acid