protein

Term: protein

Origin: Anc Greek πρώτος /protos (=first or prime importance)
+(feminine) -ίνη/ine, French chemical suffix for feminine nouns used in chemistry to form endings of substances.  

Coined:. by Jons Jakob Berzelius (1779-1848) a Swedish chemist  in 1838. In the 1830s, on the advice of Berzelius, Dutch chemist Gerhardus JohannesMulder (1802-1880) carried out elemental analysis of common animal and plant proteins. Munder observed that  proteins had nearly the same empirical formula (is the simplest whole number ratio of atoms of each element present in a compound), roughly C400H620N100O120PnSm, where subscripts n and m are constants which vary per protein. In 1837, Mulder published his findings in which he hypothesized that there was one basic substance (‘Grundstoff'’) that it was synthesized by plants and absorbed from them by animals in digestion. Berzelius proposed the name protein for this substance in a letter dated July 10, 1838: ‘the name protein that I propose for the organic oxide of fibrin and albumin, I wanted to derive from Greek word πρωτειος, because it appears to be the primitive or principal substance of animal nutrition.’

Definition:

Biological nitrogenous molecules which are made of 20 amino acids linked into linear chains, called polypeptide chains. The sequence of the polypeptide chain is defined by a gene with genetic code.

runon derivatives :

proteomics, lipoprotein

comments:

The word “catalysis” was coined also by Berzelius in 1835 who noted that certain chemicals or material speed up a chemical reaction.