A bioinformatics view of zinc enzymes

Thanks to the contributions of scientists like Bert Vallee, zinc enzymology is an area of research with a rich history and a strong basis of biochemical and biophysical knowledge. In recent years, the dramatic development of the genomic and post-genomic research has provided this as well as all other fields of life sciences with a massive body of new data, including, but not limited to, protein sequence and structural data. By integrating these new data with the wealth of information available in the literature, it is possible to achieve an unprecedented overview of the properties and functions of zinc enzymes in the context of biological systems. To this aim, the role of bioinformatics is essential. In this work, we use bioinformatics tools and databases that we have developed for the study of metalloproteins to gain insights into the functions of zinc in zinc enzymes, its coordination properties, and the usage of zinc enzymes in living organisms. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.