Assay-guided isolation of naturally-occurring neuroactive substances

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.