VACCINE

Journal Of Trace Elements In Medicine And Biology • April 2015
The binding, transport and fate of aluminium in biological cells
Author information
Exley C1, Mold MJ2.
The Birchall Centre, Lennard-Jones Laboratories
Keele University, Staffordshire ST5 5BG, UK
c.exley@keele.ac.uk
Abstract
Aluminium is the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust and yet, paradoxically, it has no known
biological function. Aluminium is biochemically reactive, it is simply that it is not required for any
essential process in extant biota. There is evidence neither of element-specific nor evolutionarily
conserved aluminium biochemistry. This means that there are no ligands or chaperones which are
specific to its transport, there are no transporters or channels to selectively facilitate its passage
across membranes, there are no intracellular storage proteins to aid its cellular homeostasis and
there are no pathways which evolved to enable the metabolism and excretion of aluminium. Of
course, aluminium is found in every compartment of every cell of every organism, from virus
through to Man. Herein we have investigated each of the ‘silent’ pathways and metabolic events
which together constitute a form of aluminium homeostasis in biota, identifying and evaluating as
far as is possible what is known and, equally importantly, what is unknown about its uptake, transport,
storage and excretion.
“Of course, aluminium is found in every compartment
of every cell of every organism, from virus through to Man.
Herein we have investigated each of the ‘silent’ pathways
and metabolic events which together constitute a form of
aluminium homeostasis in biota, identifying and evaluating
as far as is possible what is known and, equally importantly,
what is unknown about its uptake, transport, storage and excretion.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25498314