The results of a comparative study of two samples of the rhizobacterium Azospirillum brasilense (strain Sp245) prepared in different conditions and of human liver ferritin using Mössbauer spectroscopy with a high velocity resolution demonstrated the presence of ferritin-like iron (i.e. iron similar to that found in ferritin-like proteins) in the bacterium. Mössbauer spectra of these samples wer...

Ferritin is a cytosolic molecule comprised of subunits that self-assemble into a nanocage capable of containing up to 4500 iron atoms. Iron stored within ferritin can be mobilized for use within cells or exported from cells. Expression of ferroportin (Fpn) results in export of cytosolic iron and ferritin degradation. Fpn-mediated iron loss from ferritin occurs in the cytosol and precedes ferrit...

We have investigated the effect of iron on the expression of transferrin receptors (TrfRs) and ferritin chains in cultures of human peripheral blood monocytes maturing to macrophages. Monocyte-macrophage maturation is associated with a gradual rise of Trf-binding capacity in the absence of cell proliferation. At all culture times, treatment with ferric ammonium citrate induces a dose-dependent ...

Parkinson’s disease is one of the most frequent human neurodegenerations. Motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease are the consequence of the destruction of nervous cells in the substantia nigra (SN), a small (about 500 mg) structure located deep in human brain. The concentration of iron in SN is comparable to that in liver and is equal to about 180 ± 60 ng/mg of wet tissue and the iron in SN is m...

Ferritin is a protein of 24 subunits which assemble into a shell with 432 point symmetry. It can be denatured reversibly in acidic guanidine hydrochloride, with the formation of poorly populated renaturation intermediates. In order to increase the accumulation of intermediates and to study the mechanism of ferritin renaturation, we analysed variants of the human ferritin H-chain altered at the ...

Two physicochemically and metabolically separate pools of ferritin, namely cytosolic ferritin and lipid-associated ferritin, are present in the livers of guinea pigs. In this paper we establish that the iron content of cytosolic ferritin is dependent on and linearly related to ascorbic acid concentration, whereas changes in concentration of this vitamin do not affect the iron content of lipid-a...

Iron regulatory protein 1 (IRP1), a major posttranscriptional regulator of cellular iron and energy metabolism, is controlled by an iron-sulfur cluster switch. Cysteine-437 is critical for coordinating the cluster, and its replacement yields mutants that do not respond to iron perturbations and constitutively bind to cognate mRNA iron-responsive elements (IREs). The expression of IRP1(C437S) in...

Unsatisfactory results obtained by histological evaluation of liver tissue in iron loading diseases prompted us to study the distribution of the total liver iron, haem iron and ferritin iron in post mortem human liver tissue from two different sites of the same liver. The total liver iron content was measured by flameless atomic absorption spectroscopy in native liver homogenates and in acid di...

In this work, we aimed to evaluate the levels of ferritin enriched in H subunits (H-ferritin) and ferritin enriched in L subunits (L-ferritin) and the cells expressing these two molecules in the lymph node (LN) biopsies obtained from adult-onset Still's disease (AOSD) patients, and the possible correlation among these data and the severity of the disease. Ten patients with AOSD underwent LN bio...