Gladyshev Vadim N, Zhang Yan
Division of Genetics, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, New Research Building, 77 Av. Pasteur, Boston, MA, 02115, USA,
Met Ions Life Sci. 2013;12:529-80. doi: 10.1007/978-94-007-5561-1_16.
Biological trace metals are needed in small quantities, but used by all living organisms. They are employed in key cellular functions in a variety of biological processes, resulting in the various degree of dependence of organisms on metals. Most effort in the field has been placed on experimental studies of metal utilization pathways and metal-dependent proteins. On the other hand, systemic level analyses of metalloproteomes (or metallomes) have been limited for most metals. In this chapter, we focus on the recent advances in comparative genomics, which provides many insights into evolution and function of metal utilization. These studies suggested that iron and zinc are widely used in biology (presumably by all organisms), whereas some other metals such as copper, molybdenum, nickel, and cobalt, show scattered occurrence in various groups of organisms. For these metals, most user proteins are well characterized and their dependence on a specific element is evolutionarily conserved. We also discuss evolutionary dynamics of the dependence of user proteins on different metals. Overall, comparative genomics analysis of metallomes provides a foundation for the systemic level understanding of metal utilization as well as for investigating the general features, functions, and evolutionary dynamics of metal use in the three domains of life.
生物痕量金属需求量很少，但所有生物都需要。它们在各种生物过程的关键细胞功能中发挥作用，导致生物体对金属有不同程度的依赖。该领域的大部分工作都集中在金属利用途径和金属依赖性蛋白的实验研究上。另一方面，对于大多数金属而言，金属蛋白质组（或金属组）的系统水平分析一直很有限。在本章中，我们重点关注比较基因组学的最新进展，它为金属利用的进化和功能提供了许多见解。这些研究表明，铁和锌在生物学中广泛使用（可能所有生物都使用），而其他一些金属，如铜、钼、镍和钴，在不同生物群体中的分布则较为分散。对于这些金属，大多数使用它们的蛋白质已得到充分表征，并且它们对特定元素的依赖性在进化上是保守的。我们还将讨论使用金属的蛋白质对不同金属依赖性的进化动态。总体而言，金属组的比较基因组学分析为从系统水平理解金属利用以及研究生命三个域中金属使用的一般特征、功能和进化动态奠定了基础。
