Why does Vitamin C exist? How did it evolve? We often take for granted that all the things in and around us are the result of evolution, or going farther much farther back to get the actual elements, the result of a supernova. I’ll save the chemistry of the universe for another post, however, because today I am focusing on vitamin C.

UCLA and Dartmouth scientists have identified a crucial enzyme in plant vitamin C synthesis. The discovery completes our understanding of the 10-step process by which plants convert glucose into vitamin C, which itself is crucial protective antioxidant in plants that produce it.

“If we can find ways to enhance the activity of this enzyme, it may be possible to engineer plants to make more vitamin C and produce better crops,” said ke,

When life on Earth began, explained Steven Clarke, there was almost no oxygen on Earth. “Two-billion years ago plants devised an efficient way to get sunlight to make sugar from carbon dioxide that produced oxygen as a waste product; that waste product probably killed off most of all living species at that time,” Clarke said. “The only organisms that survived developed defenses against it, and one of the best defenses is vitamin C. Plants learned how to make vitamin C to protect themselves.”

Clarke, who studies the biochemistry of aging, said the finding is an example of serendipity in science. “We hit on gold,” Clarke said, “because we now have a chance to improve human nutrition and to increase the resistance of plants to oxidative stress. Plants may grow better with more vitamin C, especially with more ozone in the atmosphere due to pollution.”