Iron, copper and zinc are essential metals for cell metabolism. Plants have evolved different schemes to efficiently mobilize low-solubility nutrients such as metals from their environment and to transport them between organs. In this review we highlight the divergences and convergences of the iron, copper and zinc uptake, transport and homoeostatic pathways.

2:00 2:30 Maarten Merkx – Multicolor intracellular zinc imaging. 2:30 3:00 Artur Krezel – Zinc ion probes for investigating transient zinc protein interactions 3:00 3:30 Wolfgang Maret – Chemical biology of probes for cellular metallotransmitters 3:30 4:00 Tea 4:00 4:30 Bob Hider – Iron sensitive fluorescent probes: monitoring the intracellular labile iron pool. 4:30 5:00 Lukas Kuhn – Iron regu...

Many arthropod zinc-finger transcription factors contain a N-terminal domain called ZAD (Zinc-finger Associated Domain), which consists of four cysteines coordinating a single zinc ion. Dimerization ability has been shown for several ZAD-domains. The functional role of this domain is poorly understood. In this paper, we demonstrate that a point mutation within the ZAD-domain of the Zw5 insulato...

Parameters for the zinc ion have been developed in the self-consistent charge density functional tight-binding (SCC-DFTB) framework. The approach was tested against B3LYP calculations for a range of systems, including small molecules that contain the typical coordination environment of zinc in biological systems (cysteine, histidine, glutamic/aspartic acids, and water) and active site models fo...

Iron and zinc interact at the enterocyte during absorption, but the mechanism(s) remain elusive. The aim was, therefore, to understand the mechanism of interaction using kinetic analyses of iron and zinc uptake, individually and in combination under normal and altered cellular mineral concentrations in human intestinal Caco-2 cell line. Striking differences in kinetic parameters were observed b...

The strong association of APOBEC3 cytidine deaminases with somatic mutations leading to cancers accentuates the importance of their tight intracellular regulation to minimize cellular transformations. We reveal a novel allosteric regulatory mechanism of APOBEC3 enzymes showing that APOBEC3G and APOBEC3A coordination of a secondary zinc ion, reminiscent to ancestral deoxycytidylate deaminases, e...

Protoporphyrin IX ferrochelatase (EC 4.99.1.1) catalyzes the terminal step in the heme biosynthetic pathway, the insertion of ferrous iron into protoporphyrin IX. Ferrochelatase shows specificity, in vitro, for multiple metal ion substrates and exhibits substrate inhibition in the case of zinc, copper, cobalt, and nickel. Zinc is the most biologically significant of these; when iron is depleted...