by RSC Publishing (Author)
Metals play a vital role in the metabolism of plants and animals and, increasingly, in medicine. This book provides an introduction to the metals essential to life and ligands of biological importance. It considers the uptake of metals, their transport and ultimately their storage, illustrated in particular with the story of iron in the body. It also considers Na, K and Ca ion channels and biomineralisation and covers the key roles that metals and their complexes play in living systems, for example in respiration and photosynthesis. The last chapter (delivered online) considers metal toxicity and deficiency as well as the role that metals play in medicine, looking at both diagnostics and therapy, and in the forefront of inorganic research.
Format: Illustrated
Pages: 232
Edition: Illustrated
Publisher: Royal Society of Chemistry
Published: 30 Nov 2009
ISBN 10: 1849730598
ISBN 13: 9781849730594
Bioinorganic
Metals and life
Eleanor Crabb and E.A Moore (Eds)
RSC Publishing, Cambridge, UK, 2009, 226pp (SB) ISBN 9781849730594
Reviewed by Peter Sadler
Bioinorganic chemistry is an exciting branch of inorganic chemistry. Rather than being peripheral to biology, inorganic elements and metals in particular control some of the most fundamental of biological processes, such as respiration and transcription.
... The major classes of biological ligands covered are amino acids, peptides and proteins, and macrocycles (eg porphyrins), with rather little on metal coordination to nucleic acids (DNA and RNA).
Some topics are dealt with in depth, including iron uptake, metal transport, metal storage (ferritin, metallothionein), biomineralisation (mainly Fe and Ca plus crystal chemistry), the catalytic and structural roles of Zn proteins, vitamin B12 (Co), electron transport (Fe, Cu proteins), oxygen transport and respiration mainly Fe and Cu centres), photosynthesis (ph