The bioinorganic chemistry of iron is central to life processes. Organisms must recruit iron from their environment, control iron storage and trafficking within cells, assemble the complex, iron-containing redox cofactors of metalloproteins, and manage a myriad of biochemical transformations by those enzymes. The coordination chemistry and the variable oxidation states of iron provide the essen...

Homeostatic systems for essential and non-essential metals create the cellular environments in which the correct metals are acquired by metalloproteins while the incorrect ones are somehow avoided. Cyanobacteria have metal requirements often absent from other bacteria; copper in thylakoidal plastocyanin, zinc in carboxysomal carbonic anhydrase, cobalt in cobalamin but magnesium in chlorophyll, ...

Lytic polysaccharide monooxygenases (LPMOs) have changed our understanding of lignocellulosic degradation dramatically over the last years. These metalloproteins catalyze oxidative cleavage of recalcitrant polysaccharides and can act on the C1 and/or C4 position of glycosidic bonds. Structural data have led to several hypotheses, but we are still a long way from reaching complete understanding ...

Metal ions are functionally or structurally important centers in metalloproteins or RNAs, which makes them interesting targets for spectroscopic investigations. In combination with site-directed spin labeling, pulsed electron-electron double resonance (PELDOR or DEER) could be a well-suited method to characterize and localize them. Here, we report on the synthesis, full characterization, and PE...

Paramagnetism-based nuclear pseudocontact shifts and spin relaxation enhancements contain a wealth of information in solid-state NMR spectra about electron-nucleus distances on the ∼20 Å length scale, far beyond that normally probed through measurements of nuclear dipolar couplings. Such data are especially vital in the context of structural studies of proteins and other biological molecules th...

In this work we show that it is possible to prepare and study a cobalt-substituted hemoglobin-a coboglobin (Cb).-and that this reconstituted metalloprotein exhibits reversible oxygen binding. The effect of the protein environment on Co(II)-protoporphyrin IX is directly observed by esr measurements on deoxy- and oxy-Cb and by oxygen uptake measurements, all of which may be compared with similar ...

Oxidation (off state) and reduction (on state) of a single azurin molecule is monitored, one electron at a time, which depend on the chemical redox potential. By analysing the fluorescence time traces from individual azurin molecules, reaction kinetics and redox thermodynamics were determined.

The metal-binding preferences of most metalloproteins do not match their metalrequirements. Thus, metallation of an estimated 30% of metalloenzymes is aided by metaldelivery systems, with ~25% acquiring preassembled metal-cofactors. The remaining ~70% are presumed to compete for metals from buffered metal-pools. Metallation is further aided by maintaining the relative concentrations of these po...