I used this literature discussion in my second-year inorganic chemistry course as an applied example of the hard-soft acid base concept and as a way to introduce students to metal binding in proteins (as well as the PDB). In the section on HSAB, students accessed the PDB during a lecture period in order to visualize the bonding schemes presented in the paper, and we discussed the bonding preferences in terms of HSAB theory. In the last lecture of the semester, we returned to the content of the paper and Dr. O'Halloran's TED talk to discuss the important and varied roles that metals play in cell biology, as well as the exciting and truly multidisciplinary opportunities for research in this field. 

 

This topic was a great way to end the class. Students were fascinated by the zinc spark images presented in the TED talk, and were excited to see a direct application for several of the topics that we had covered in the course. One student remarked that she had studied the cell maturation and fertilization process in a previous biology class, but had never connected those ideas with the chemistry that was occurring inside the cell until seeing the TED video.

 

I corresponded with Dr. O'Halloran after this lecture, and he informed me that his group has just published a new paper on this topic, in Nature Chemistry in Dec 2014 (doi:10.1038/nchem.2133). This new paper would be a great way to extend and deepen the discussion of this topic in future courses.