Essential metals in health and disease

🤖 Plain-English Summary

In total, twenty elements appear to be essential for the correct functioning of the human body, half of which are metals and half are non-metals. It is clear that a stronger cooperation between bioinorganic chemists and biophysicists - who have already achieved great success in understanding the structure and role of metalloenzymes in living systems - with biologists, will access new avenues of research in the systems biology of metal ions.

🔑 Key Findings

• Among those metals that are currently considered to be essential for normal biological functioning are four main group elements, sodium (Na), potassium (K), magnesium (Mg), and calcium (Ca), and six d-block transition metal elements, manganese (Mn), iron (Fe), cobalt (Co), copper (Cu), zinc (Zn) and molybdenum (Mo).
• Cells have developed various metallo-regulatory mechanisms for maintaining a necessary homeostasis of metal-ions for diverse cellular processes, most importantly in the central nervous system.
• Since redox active transition metals (for example Fe and Cu) may participate in electron transfer reactions, their homeostasis must be carefully controlled.

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