Transport, Storage, and Homeostasis of Metal Ions

Chapter 8 Transport, Storage, and Homeostasis of Metal Ions... 

In what follows, we discuss uptake, i.e., assimilation of metal ions from the environment into the organism itself. Later, in Chapter 8, we consider metal transport, storage, and homeostasis within organisms and cells. 

As in Chapter 7, we successively consider the transport, storage and metal ion homeostasis in prokaryotes, plants and animals. Since the assimilation of metals in unicellular bacteria does not require their transport to other cell types, we confine our discussion only to storage and homeostasis. 

While unicellular fungi do not require metal transport systems, multi-cellular fungi and plants most certainly do, and we consider their transport in plants, and then consider how metal ions are sequestered in storage compartments before addressing their homeostasis. Once again, we consider in turn these processes for iron, copper and zinc. Since iron metabolism has been most intensively studied in S. cerevisiae, of all the fungi, we will focus our attention on iron homeostatic mechanisms, however, as the reader will see shortly, copper and zinc homeostasis have many similarities. 

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