Oral presentations-Ferritin: another 'dialogue concerning the two chief world systems' Kourosh Honarmand-Ebrahimi, Peter-Leon

摘要

Some four decades of intensive biochemical research on the ubiquitous iron storage protein ferritin has provided a wealth of structural, spectroscopic, kinetic, and thermodynamic data, from whose analysis in recent years a sub-molecular picture of the mechanism of action is beginning to emerge. Consensus, however, does not seem to be around the corner yet, although the spectrum of viewpoints at this time appears to condense into two well demarcated but mutually exclusive models: (1) the unifying proposal that all ferritins essentially work according to a single mode of operation (e.g. [1, 2]), versus (2) the diversifying proposal that different classes of ferritins exhibit fundamental differences in their respective mechanisms (e.g. [3, 4]).