Functional diversity across families of bacterial metalloregulators: what can we learn about specificity from sequence similarity? (opens in new tab)

Metal ions play essential roles in bacterial physiology, acting as cofactors and signals for transcriptional responses under stress conditions. To maintain metal homeostasis, bacteria rely on specialized metalloregulatory transcription factors, including representatives of the ArsR, MerR, Fur, MarR, and other families. Although these regulators have been extensively studied in a handful of model organisms, the vast majority of their homologs across bacterial diversity remain uncharacterized. ...