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Intracellular Zinc Trafficking: An Interplay Of Proteome, Metallothioneine And Glutathione, Afsana Mahim

Theses and Dissertations

Zinc is the second most abundant transition metal in living organisms. Typically, a eukaryotic cell contains approximately 3000 zinc binding proteins, in which zinc plays structural or catalytic roles. Recently, zinc has been reported to have signaling functions as a secondary messenger. Considering the diverse cellular functions of zinc, the trafficking pathways that help zinc, following its uptake into cytosol, find the target proteins and generate native Zn-Proteins are not well-understood. For past few decades, metallothionein, a zinc binding protein with large stability constants for Zn2+, has been thought of as a mediator in transferring zinc to apo-Proteins. However, gene …