Nickel carbonic anhydrase

Nickel is required by plants when urea is the source of nitrogen (Price and Morel, 1991). Bicarbonate uptake by cells may be limited by Zn as HCOT transport involves the zinc metal-loenzyme carbonic anhydrase (Morel et al., 1994). Cadmium is not known to be required by organisms but because it can substitute for Zn in some metalloenzymes it can promote the growth of Zn-limited phytoplankton (Price and Morel, 1990). Cobalt can also substitute for Zn but less efficiently than Cd. 

Water NMRD profiles acquired for other complexes and proteins always exhibit the same features of hexaaqua nickel(II). As an example, we report here the profile of the hexa-coordinate nickel(II)-substituted bovine carbonic anhydrase II 54,55) (Fig. 15). As in the aqua complex, (i) the low-field profile is flat, (ii) no dispersion appears, the cOg dispersion being quenched in S = 1 complexes with large static ZFS 56) (see Section I.A.5) and the... 

Water H R values have been measured for nickel(II)-substituted bovine carbonic anhydrase II [132,135] (Fig. 5.48), for which the following coordination polyhedron has been proposed [136,137] ... 

As with carbonic anhydrase the metal is in a cleft that exposes the active site. Interestingly the metal-free enzyme is inactive but the cobalt and nickel analogues are more active. It appears that the transition state complex, where the terminal amino acid side chain is held in place while the peptide bond is hydrolysed, requires six-fold co-ordination. The activation energy required to change from the tetrahedral to octahedral geometries is higher for zinc than the other metals. 

It is known that a vast variety of enzymes use metal ions in acid/base catalysts. In some cases the role of the metal is to activate water directly, e.g. Zn(OH)2 becomes Zn(OH ) in carbonic anhydrase, but in others it may be that the metal just forms a particularly constructive (useful) H-bond network, e.g. calcium in phospholipase A2 and in staph, nuclease. Substitution of one metal by other metals is now a critical test of the precision of the catalytic site and we know that nickel does not substitute for zinc in carbonic anhydrase, although it binds, and that Sr(II) has a different activity in lipases and nucleases from Ca(II). It is the water in the coordination sphere which is partly responsible for these changes. 

Phytoplankton particulate matter (organic and biomineralized) contains many trace elements. The most abundant are magnesium, cadmium, iron, calcium, barium, copper, nickel, zinc, and aluminum (Table 1), which are important constituents of enzymes, pigments, and structural materials. Carbonic anhydrase requires zinc or cadmium (Price and Morel, 1990 Lane and Morel, 2000), nitrate reductase requires iron (Geider and LaRoche, 1994), and chlorophyll contains magnesium. Additionally, elements such as sodium, magnesium, phosphorus, chlorine, potassium, and calcium may be present as ions... 

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