The antibiotics chloramphenicol, lincomycin and erythromycin have been shown to be specific inhibitors of mitOchondrial protein synthesis in yeast, both in vitro and in vivo --(Clark-Walker & Linnane, 1966, 1967; Linnane, Lamb, Christodoulou & Lukins, 1968). Yeast cells growing in the presence of any of these antibiotics can no longer synthesize the mitochondrial cytochromes 5, 3, b, and 2, but...

The P-450 cytochromes have been characterized biochemically in recent years as a family of monooxygenases that reductively activate molecular oxygen for insertion into steroids and other physiologically occurring lipids. Many of these enzymes are also known to bind and oxygenate a host of foreign compounds, including alcohol, drugs, pesticides, anesthetics, and mutagens. Some of the poorly unde...

Cytochromes P450 (P450s or CYPs) belong to a multigene family of more than 3,000 heme proteins which catalyse the NADPH-dependent monooxygenation and other about 60 distinct classes of biotransformation reactions. Cytochromes P450 are known to be involved in the metabolism of over 1,000,000 different xenobiotic and endobiotic lipophilic substrates (Shumyantseva, Bulko, Archakov, 2005). Cytochro...