Plant polyphenols, including dietary polyphenols such as resveratrol, are important components in the plant antioxidant and defence systems. They are also known to exert beneficial effects on human health through diet. As they are produced, these polyphenols may be subjected to deleterious enzymic oxidation by the plant polyphenol oxidases. They are generally synthesized as glycosides like 5,4'...

Tyrosinase (monophenol monooxygenase; monophenol, L-dopa:oxygen oxidoreductase, EC 1.14.18.1) is a key enzyme in the synthesis of melanin. Reduced levels of tyrosinase play an important role in albinism. The data described here show differences in the expression and characteristics of tyrosinase in cutaneous murine melanocytes grown in culture from normal wild-type strains (C/C); from three alb...

Tyrosinases, widely distributed among animals, plants and fungi, are involved in the biosynthesis of melanin, a pigment that has been exploited, in the course of evolution, to serve different functions. We conducted a deep evolutionary analysis of tyrosinase family amongst metazoa, thanks to the availability of new sequenced genomes, assessing that tyrosinases (tyr) represent a distinctive feat...

Tyrosinases, bifunctional metalloenzymes, catalyze the oxidation of monophenols and o-diphenols to o-quinones, the precursor compounds of the brown-coloured pigment melanin. In eukaryotic organisms, tyrosinases are expressed as latent zymogens that have to be proteolytically cleaved in order to form highly active enzymes. This activation mechanism, known as the tyrosinase maturation process, ha...

authors identified a tyrosinase-like enzyme, NspF, that was homologous to tyrosinaselike GriF in grixazone biosynthesis. Tyrosinases contain a binuclear copper cluster and have known functions as monoand diphenol oxidases (for example, in melanin production), in keeping with the elucidated role of GriF. However, because a traditional N-oxidase was absent from the 4,3-HNBAm gene cluster, the aut...