The organic compound citrulline is a non-essential α-amino acid. Its name is derived from citrullus, the Latin word for watermelon. Although named and described by gastroenterologists since the late 19th century, it was first isolated from watermelon in 1914 by Japanese researchers Yatarō Koga (古賀彌太郎) and Ryō Ōtake (大嶽了) and further codified by Mitsunori Wada of Tokyo Imperial University in 1930. It has the formula H2NC(O)NH(CH2)3CH(NH2)CO2H. It is a key intermediate in the urea cycle, the pathway by which mammals excrete ammonia by converting it into urea. Citrulline is also produced as a byp
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The organic compound citrulline is a non-essential α-amino acid. Its name is derived from citrullus, the Latin word for watermelon. Although named and described by gastroenterologists since the late 19th century, it was first isolated from watermelon in 1914 by Japanese researchers Yatarō Koga (古賀彌太郎) and Ryō Ōtake (大嶽了) and further codified by Mitsunori Wada of Tokyo Imperial University in 1930. It has the formula H2NC(O)NH(CH2)3CH(NH2)CO2H. It is a key intermediate in the urea cycle, the pathway by which mammals excrete ammonia by converting it into urea. Citrulline is also produced as a byproduct of the enzymatic production of nitric oxide from the amino acid arginine, catalyzed by nitric oxide synthase.
==Biosynthesis== Citrulline can be derived from: from arginine via nitric oxide synthase, as a byproduct of the production of nitric oxide for signaling purposes from ornithine through the breakdown of proline or glutamine/glutamate from asymmetric dimethylarginine via DDAH
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).