Origins
When was NAD discovered?
NAD is not a peptide either, and it is older than the peptide bond as a settled idea by four years.
The short answer
| Date | 1906 |
| Who | Arthur Harden and William Young |
| Where | Lister Institute, London |
| Origin | Found, not designed — it occurs naturally and was isolated from tissue. |
Where it came from
Harden and Young were working on fermentation. They found that yeast juice stopped fermenting sugar when it was dialysed — something small had passed through the membrane and been lost — and that adding the boiled dialysate back restored it. Whatever it was survived boiling, so it was not an enzyme. They called it a coferment.
Identifying the coferment took decades. Hans von Euler-Chelpin worked out its structure in the 1930s, and Otto Warburg established what it actually does: carry a hydride from one reaction to another, over and over. Harden and von Euler-Chelpin shared the Nobel Prize in 1929; Warburg received one in 1931.
Chemically it is a dinucleotide — two nucleotides joined through their phosphates — and it has nothing structurally in common with anything else in this catalogue.
Why it is called that
Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide: the two halves of the molecule, and what joins them.
Where it stands now
NAD and its precursors are sold in several regulatory categories depending on country and form. Material supplied for laboratory work is not a medicine or a supplement.
What this page does not say
Nothing above is a statement about what NAD+ does in a body, and none of it is guidance on use. A compound’s history is a record of laboratories and dates; it is not evidence for anything, and the fact that a programme was looking for something is not a finding that it was found.
