Metals and Life

Metals play a vital role in the metabolism of plants and animals and, increasingly, in medicine. This book provides an introduction to the metals essential to life and ligands of biological importance. It considers the uptake of metals, their transport and ultimately their storage, illustrated in particular with the story of iron in the body. It also considers Na, K and Ca ion channels and biomineralisation and covers the key roles that metals and their complexes play in living systems, for example in respiration and photosynthesis. The last chapter (delivered online) considers metal toxicity and deficiency as well as the role that metals play in medicine, looking at both diagnostics and therapy, and in the forefront of inorganic research.

Eleanor Crabb is a Lecturer in materials chemistry at The Open University and was recently seconded part-time to one of the Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) awarded to The Open University. Her research interests are in heterogeneous catalysis. She has written on a number of science courses, producing both text based and multimedia materials, including Separation, Purification and Identification, part of the Molecular World Series (a collection of OU undergraduate texts also published by the RSC). Rob Davies is a Senior Lecturer in inorganic chemistry at Imperial College London. His research interests lie in synthetic organometallic and coordination chemistry, especially of the main group metals, and he has published extensively in these areas. He is also the author of a chapter in the Handbook of Chalcogen Chemistry, New Perspectives in Sulfur, Selenium and Tellurium, Cambridge, published by the RSC. Rob Janes is a Staff Tutor at The Open University in Wales. He has co-authored the Elements of the p-block in the Molecular World Series and has produced a CD-ROM-database of chemical demonstrations to accompany the book. Together with Elaine Moore, he was also a co-author of Metal-ligand bonding, another RSC publication. He is a co-presenter of Magic Molecules, a demonstration lecture aimed at schools and the general public. Elaine Moore is Reader in theoretical chemistry at The Open University. Her research interests lie in the field of computational chemistry. She is the author of OU teaching texts in chemistry, physics and astronomy, including Molecular Modelling and Bonding, in the Molecular World Series, and Metal-ligand bonding. Lesley Smart is a Visiting Senior Lecturer in chemistry at The Open University. She has written on many science courses and chaired the production of the Molecular World Series. She is also an author of two books in the series' The Third Dimension and Separation, Purification and Identification. Paul Walton is Professor of Bioinorganic Chemistry at the University of York. His research interests include synthetic models of zinc metalloenzymes, metal sensors and metal complex catalysts for carbon dioxide conversion. He also has strong interests in teaching, having won the Royal Society of Chemistry's Higher Education Award in 2000.