What is it about?
Throughan overview of improvements and limits of the state of the art of synthetic fluorescent probes for thedetection of intracellular zinc and copper, we report here new routes for the design and the synthesisof novel metal coordination compounds able to overcome the present weaknesses for a new concept ofdynamic metallostasis.
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Why is it important?
The intracellular tracking of zinc and copper, metals essential for life, is nowadays pivotal to unravel thecomplex mechanism that involves the physiological or pathological role of such elements. Traditionalmethods to determine cellular copper and zinc levels, including those based on the use of fluores-cent probes, are aimed at scrutinizing the metallome, to identify both the individual species and theirconcentrations. The metallome, however, is also a nonstatic concept, as it responds to environmentalperturbations in biologically relevant pathways, with highly dynamic spatiotemporal changes.
Perspectives
Although fluorescent probes for zinc and copper are reliable can-didates as powerful tools to investigate movement of the pools ofthese metals within cells, some questions still remain open. Theseconcern specificity, subcellular targeting, effects of the probes onthe metal labile pools, and the interdependence between the addi-tion of extracellular metal and perturbation of various cellularconditions affecting metal-specific transporters, chaperones, andsignaling pathways
Dr Giuseppe Trusso Sfrazzetto
University of Catania
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Synthetic fluorescent probes to map metallostasis and intracellular fate of zinc and copper, Coordination Chemistry Reviews, March 2016, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.ccr.2015.11.012.
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