Abstract
Zinc is an essential metal in biology, playing a structural or functional role in up to 10% of the human proteome. Certain cell types experience fluctuations in labile zinc, and these zinc dynamics have been shown to play a role in cellular signaling. Neurons in the hippocampus concentrate synaptic zinc, but its function in signal transduction and neuronal development is not fully understood. We use and develop fluorescent tools to explore how physiologically‐relevant changes in labile zinc impact intracellular kinase signaling in single cells and in the context of neuronal signaling. In this work, we demonstrate that increases in labile cellular zinc lead to greater activation of ERK kinase and explore the mechanism of this activation. The impact of zinc on other signaling pathways are also explored using fluorescent biosensors and kinase activity profiling. Understanding how zinc impacts cell signaling pathways is fundamental to characterizing the effects of zinc fluctuations in a variety of cell types.Support or Funding InformationNSF Graduate Research Fellowship and NIH T32 Biophysics Training GrantThis abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.
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