Chapter 5 Trace metal nutrition and response to deficiency

Metals are nutritionally essential because of their indispensable function as catalysts in proteins. Accordingly, strategies for handling deficiencies are multilayered to cover wide concentration ranges and multifaceted to ensure selectivity, and include regulated transport of metal ions across membranes, intracellular compartmentalization, and metal-sparing/recycling to optimize metal-use efficiency. Overlaid on these processes are additional circuits that respond to the metabolic state of the cell. The guiding principles underlying metal homeostasis strategies is to ensure a supply of metal ions to metal-dependent proteins while avoiding potential toxicity of excess metal ions. Chlamydomonas reinhardtii has served as an advantageous reference organism for the discovery and understanding of metal homeostasis mechanisms at the molecular and systems levels. New experimental resources, such as genomics, RNAseq, proteomics, and subcellular metal imaging, combined with classic genetic and biochemical analyses are bringing us closer to a molecular understanding of supply dynamics and acclimation in Chlamydomonas and beyond.

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