Folic Acid or Folate

Folic acid or folate is a B vitamin. It is also referred to as vitamin M,^[4] vitamin B₉,^[5] vitamin B_c^[6] (or folacin),pteroyl-L-glutamic acid, and pteroyl-L-glutamate.^[7] The term folate is often used in the food supplement industry to denote something different than "pure" folic acid: in chemistry, the term folate refers to the deprotonated ion and folic acid to the neutral molecule, which both co-exist in water. (The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry and the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology clearly state that "folate and folic acid are the preferred synonyms for pteroylglutamate and pteroylglutamic acid, respectively.^[8]) The term folate in the food industry often refers to "the natural occurring form of folic acid". There is no "natural" and chemical form of folate and folic acid, and the two terms can be used interchangeably. It is likely that in the food industry, the term "folate" is used to indicate a collection of "folates" which is not chemically well-characterized, including other members of the family of pteroylglutamates, or mixtures of them, having various levels of reduction of the pteridine ring, one-carbon substitutions and different numbers of glutamate residues, all of which can be found in nature. Folic acid is synthetically produced, and used in fortified foods andsupplements.^[9] Folate is converted by humans to dihydrofolate (dihydrofolic acid), tetrahydrofolate (tetrahydrofolic acid), and other derivatives, which have various biological activities. ^[10]

Source : Wikipedia