Calcium: outside/inside homeostasis and signalling

AbstractMore and more data accumulate concerning calcium dependent effects in all compartments of cells. The higher the organism in evolution the more calcium becomes involved. Inspection of the data while looking for an explanation of the involvement of calcium in metabolism, nuclear functions, control over pumps, external activities, mineralisation and so on leads one to suppose that calcium has an integrating function. The implication is that calcium flow is a large network connecting the environment, the cytoplasm, vesicles, organelles, the nucleus and in higher species, organs. There is the possibility then that calcium ion functions are being analysed, often in vitro, in a bit by bit reductionist manner while in vivo calcium is the equivalent of an electron in complicated electrical circuits. We then should look for its connections to energy, to effects where conformational switching by calcium pulses is equivalent to magnetic triggering by electron flow and where storage in vesicles is equivalent to condenser-like devices and so on. The appearance of pulsing, of time delays in parts of circuits, and other properties of electronic circuits seen in calcium triggering are then explicable as part of calcium circuit design. No other ion can operate in the same way due to the peculiarities of the calcium ion, its size, charge, ionisation potential and its availability which allow it both to flow rapidly yet to bind considerably

The mechanism of cytochrome oxidase and other reaction centres for electron/proton pumping

AbstractThe functional significance of the metal centres of cytochrome oxidase is deduced from the ways in which the centres are bound into its peptides. To this end use is made of structural knowledge of other metallo-proteins for dioxygen binding, haemocyanin and haemoglobin, and for electron transfer, cytochromes b and azurin. The order and manner in which the motions of helical sections of the oxidase are linked to proton pumping are suggested and a comparison is made with other proton pumps, for example that of ATP synthetases

Mass fractionation processes of transition metal isotopes

Macromolecular Biochemistr

The Chemistry Of Evolution The Development Of our Ecosystem

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The Chemistry of Evolutions

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