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Review Lecture - The prostaglandins

1972; Royal Society; Volume: 182; Issue: 1069 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1098/rspb.1972.0086

2053-9193

E. W. HORTON,

Estrogen and related hormone effects

Discovery ‘Prostaglandin’ was discovered in the 1930s by Professor U. S. von Euler of Stockholm during a search for adrenaline in animal tissues (Euler 1934, 1936). Developments were slow in this field at first, partly because of the lack of chemical methods for the purification of lipid-soluble substances. Isolation of two prosta­glandins (PGE 1 and PGF 1α ) was achieved in 1959 by Bergström & Sjövall (1960 a, b ). They and their colleagues (Bergström, Ryhage, Samuelsson & Sjövall 1963) showed that prostaglandins are a family of closely-related substances, all derivatives of the parent compound, prostanoic acid. Chemical structure Prostanoic acid is a fully saturated, twenty carbon monocarboxylic acid con­taining a cyclopentane ring (figure 1). This compound is not a naturally occurring substance but forms the basis for the nomenclature of the prostaglandins. How­ever, in the laboratory, trivial names and abbreviations are more frequently used.