Non‐heme iron through the three domains of life

Metalloproteins are proteins capable of binding one or more metal ions, which are often required for their biological function or for regulation of their activities or for structural purposes. In high‐throughput genome‐level protein investigation efforts, such as Structural Genomics, the systematic experimental characterization of metal‐binding properties (i.e. the investigation of the metalloproteome) is not always pursued, and remains far from trivial. In the present work we have applied a bioinformatic approach to investigate the occurrence of (putative) non‐heme iron‐binding proteins in 57 different organisms spanning the entire tree of life. It is found that the non‐heme iron‐proteome constitutes between 1% and 10% of the entire proteome of an organism. However, the iron‐proteome constitutes a higher fraction of the proteome in archaea (on average 7.1% ± 2.1%) than in bacteria (3.9% ± 1.6%) and in eukaryota (1.1% ± 0.4%). The analysis of the function of each putative iron‐protein identified suggests that extant organisms have inherited the large majority of their iron‐proteome from the last common ancestor. Proteins 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.