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Updated: Aug 17, 2026

Atomic Absorbance Spectroscopy to Measure Intracellular Zinc Pools in Mammalian Cells
Published on: May 16, 2019
Zinc plays both structural and catalytic roles in metalloproteins
1Department of Biochemistry, University of Missouri, Columbia 65211.
Abstract:
Zinc is bound to the catalytic site of zinc-dependent hydrolases by three amino acid residues, commonly histidines and glutamic acid, and to the structural site of gene transcription regulators by cysteine and histidine. Site-directed mutagenesis of even one catalytic-site ligand destroys enzyme activity without changing physical properties of the protein, including immunoreactivity. However, nutritional studies demonstrating loss of transcriptional activity upon zinc deprivation have not been reported.
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