Recent Advances in Zinc Enzymology.

Zinc enzymology is, compared to some other current areas of metallobiochemistry, a maturing field, but in addition to further developments of structure-function relationships it has also provided a number of surprising new results and ideas in the last few years. In fact, the number of studies makes it impossible to provide a comprehensive review of the recent literature on zinc enzymology here, and the authors therefore focus on those zinc enzymes for which structure-function relationships are possible on the basis of structural and biochemical data. This means that, with a few exceptions, only zinc enzymes for which NMR or crystal structures are available are included here. Another seemingly simple, yet experimentally sometimes complex issue concerns the choice of which metalloenzyme is a zinc enzyme. Since there is in principle no difference in chemical catalysis by low-affinity compared to high-affinity metal sites, some of these enzymes are also included in this article, especially if they are or have been discussed as zinc enzymes, or are active with zinc. 552 refs.