Revision as of 06:19, 30 October 2013

What is ferritin?

This light ferritin chain comes from humans. This part, along with heavy ferritin (BBa_K1189025 P02792 [UniParc]), form the ferritin nanoparticle, an iron-storage particle made up of 24 subunits (Chasteen et al., 1991). The formed nanoparticle is a robust, remaining stable at extreme pHs and temperatures. The light ferritin purportedly contributes to nucleation to initiate iron core formation in ferritin molecules (Chasteen et al., 1999).

This nanoparticle can also be used as a reporter when the iron core is modified with potassium ferrocyanide to form Prussian Blue. The Prussian Blue ferritin can then act as a peroxidase mimic, similar to horseradish peroxidase, resulting in colour changes in the presence of hydrogen peroxide, and TMB or ABTS (Zhang et al., 2013).

This part was primarily used to construct BBa_K1189020 in order to allow us to express and purify the protein.

Applications of BBa_K1189024

This part used primarily for the construction of parts containing the light ferritin subunit (BBa_K1189020 BBa_K1189018).

References

Chasteen, N. D., & Harrison, P. M. (1999). Mineralization in ferritin: an efficient means of iron storage. Journal of structural biology, 126(3), 182-194.

Sequence and Features