Figure 1: Ferritin is suitable for metal recycling, since it can form e.g. iron, silver and gold nanoparticles in its cavity.
Figure 2: Alignment of the protein sequences of the wild-type and the mutated human ferritin heavy chain. The Alignment was produced with Clustal Omega (Goujon et al., 2010, Sievers et al., 2011).
Figure 3: Protein structures of the wild-type human ferritin (A, RCSB ID 4oYN) and the mutated human ferritin (B, RCSB ID 3ES3). Despite the mutations of ten amino acids the ferritin retains its shape. The protein structeres were generated with Chimera (Pettersen et al., 2004).
Figure 4: Possible applications of nanoparticles produced with ferritin.
Molecular graphics and analyses performed with UCSF Chimera, developed by the Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization, and Informatics at the University of California, San Francisco, with support from NIH P41-GM103311. Butts, C.A., Swift, J., Kang, S., Di Costanzo, L., Christianson, D.W., Saven, J.G., and Dmochowski, I.J. (2008).. Directing Noble Metal Ion Chemistry within a Designed Ferritin Protein † , ‡. Biochemistry 47: 12729–12739.
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