PNNL

Abstract

In 1912, Louis-Camille Maillard described a reaction between amino acids and reducing sugars that produced a discolored (brown) reaction mixture in the presence of heat [1]. This complex network of reactions between reducing sugars and free amine groups on amino acids or proteins came to be known as the Maillard reaction and was the domain of food chemists for the next 50 years. Work in the 1960s began a very exciting era in the field. A few years earlier, several groups [2-5] reported on the heterogeneity of normal human adult hemoglobin (HbA) as determined chromatographically, and Allen et al were the first to use cation-exchange chromatography to separate a previously observed fast moving component (HbAI) into three fractions that they termed AIa, AIb, and AIc. An increase in the fast moving HbAI of four diabetic patients was subsequently reported by Huisman and Dozy in 1962 [6], and the link between diabetes and increased HbAI was later strengthened by Rahbar’s observation of increased HbAI – the majority of which is HbAIc – in 47 cases of diabetes [7]. Bookchin and Gallop determined that HbAIc consisted of a hexose bound to both ß-chains [8], and Bunn and colleagues subsequently proposed that glucose binds to the N-terminal amine groups of the ß-chain valine residues in the form of a Schiff base, which then rearranges to form an Amadori compound [9]. Thus, while Maillard chemistry was known to occur during the heating and processing of food, the identification of Amadori-modified hemoglobin proved that it also occurred in vivo (after all, as John Baynes likes to point out, humans are essentially low temperature ovens with long cooking cycles!).