Pickering I J, Prince R C, Divers T, George G N
Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, Stanford University, CA 94309, USA.
FEBS Lett. 1998 Dec 11;441(1):11-4. doi: 10.1016/s0014-5793(98)01402-1.
Sulfur is an essential biological element, yet its biochemistry is only partially understood because there are so few tools for studying this element in biological systems. X-ray absorption spectroscopy provides a unique approach to determining the chemical speciation of sulfur in intact biological samples. Different biologically relevant sulfur compounds show distinctly different sulfur K-edge X-ray absorption spectra, and we show here, as an example, that this allows the deconvolution of the sulfur species in equine blood.