Water hardness is known to control the uptake and toxicity of zinc and other metals through either chemical competition, biological acclimation, or both processes. The dominant process controlling zinc uptake has not been previously elucidated, nor has the effect of calcium been investigated independently of other cations. We determined zinc uptake by rainbow trout acclimated and exposed to fou...

Forty-five Angus steers (avg initial wt 330 kg) were individually fed for 112 d to assess the value of supplemental Zn and source on performance and carcass quality. Steers had ad libitum access to a control diet (81 ppm Zn) of 33% whole corn, 33% ground milo, 15% cottonseed hulls and 13% cottonseed meal, or this control diet with 360 mg Zn/d added from either zinc methionine or zinc oxide. Ste...

Despite attempts to use zinc (Zn) concentrations in hard tissues to comment upon the degree of carnivory in past populations, zinc has yielded inconsistent trophic level effects. The question of what, if anything, zinc in human enamel reveals regarding past diets is the focus of this research. We test whether the zinc content of deciduous tooth enamel from contemporary Mexican infants varies by...

Zinc is an essential micronutrient for several physiological and biochemical processes. To investigate its transport in rice, we characterized OsZIP8, a rice ZIP (Zrt, Irt-like Protein) gene that is strongly up-regulated in shoots and roots under Zn deficiency. OsZIP8 could complement the growth defect of Zn-uptake yeast mutant. The OsZIP8-GFP fusion proteins were localized to the plasma membra...

–A study was study wasundertaken to investigate the effect of graded levels of inorganic Zn (zinc carbonate) on growthperformance and oxidative defense mechanism inweaned female Sprague Dawley rats for experimental duration of 16 weeks.Ninety weaned rats (93.83 ± 1.308g Bwt) were randomly allotted to 30 replicates with 3 rats in each replicate which were in turn randomly allotted to 5 dietary t...

Intracellular zinc is thought to be available in a cytosolic pool of free or loosely bound Zn(II) ions in the micromolar to picomolar range. To test this, we determined the mechanism of zinc sensors that control metal uptake or export in Escherichia coli and calibrated their response against the thermodynamically defined free zinc concentration. Whereas the cellular zinc quota is millimolar, fr...

A role in signal transduction for a vanishingly small labile pool of intracellular zinc ([Zn](i)) has been inferred by the sensitivity of various physiological pathways to zinc chelators such as N,N,N',N'-tetrakis(2-pyridylmethyl)ethylenediamine (TPEN) and/or associations with changes in nonprotein-bound zinc-sensitive fluorophores. Although we (44) reported that LPS-induced apoptosis in cultur...

Cold-light bleaching treatment has grown to be a popular tooth whitening procedure in recent years, but its side effect of dental enamel demineralization is a widespread problem. The aim of this study was to synthesize zinc-substituted hydroxyapatite as an effective biomaterial to inhibit demineralization or increase remineralization. We synthesized zinc-substituted hydroxyapatite containing di...

Bacillus subtilis Zur (BsZur) represses high-affinity zinc-uptake systems and alternative ribosomal proteins in response to zinc replete conditions. Sequence alignments and structural studies of related Fur family proteins suggest that BsZur may contain three zinc-binding sites (sites 1-3). Mutational analyses confirm the essential structural role of site 1, while mutants affected in sites 2 an...

The Biotic Ligand Model has been previously developed to explain and predict the effects of water chemistry on the toxicity of copper, silver, and cadmium. In this paper, we describe the development and application of a biotic ligand model for zinc (Zn BLM). The data used in the development of the Zn BLM includes acute zinc LC50 data for several aquatic organisms including rainbow trout, fathea...