Special issue on advances and controversies in B vitamins and choline.

摘要

This special issue is aimed to report on results from the conference on "Advances and Controversies in B Vitamins and Choline" which was held on March 5-8, 2012 in Leipzig, Germany. The conference was a continuation of the earlier four biannual international conferences that were held in Saarbriicken starting in 2001. The earlier conferences focused on the topic hyperhomocysteinemia. The continuous interest in B vitamins, their metabolic aspects and relationship to diseases prompted us to organize this conference and to extend the topic to include the related nutrient, choline.The discovery of vitamins in the early 1900s, the description of their chemical structures and the clarification of their metabolic functions are important steps in the history of modern nutritional, biochemical and medical sciences. Later it was shown that choline, folate and vitamins B6 and B12 are involved in the synthesis and methylation of DNA, the formation and maintenance of myelin sheaths or the synthesis of neurotransmitters.