The discovery of maltase was done back in the year 1806 when Napoleon Bonaparte issued his "Berlin decree," which proclaimed a continental blockade. This sparked a hunt for other sugar sources. Anselm Payen and Jean-Francois Persoz who were two French chemists created a malt extract in 1833 which converted starch into glucose and they termed it as diastase at the time. H.T. Brown identified mucosal maltase activity in 1880 and distinguished it from diastase, which is today known as amylase. Arne Dahlqvist and Giorgio Semenza were able to fractionate and characterize tiny intestine maltase activity in the 1960s which led to further developments in protein chemistry. Both groups discovered that two distinct peptide structures, sucrase-isomaltase and maltase-glucoamylase, had four significant percentages of maltase activity in them. Cloning and sequencing of the mucosal starch hydrolase verified Dahlqvist and Semenza's findings fifty years later when the world entered into the genomic era.