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Er, hate to nitpick but photosynthesis uses magnesium, no? In the chlorophyll, at least, although other parts have haems with iron in :)

(Also as with anything in biology, there is no doubt some weird organism that has like a cadmium or similar in its chlorophyll, I don't know)



You're absolutely right! I don't know what I was thinking here - I blame my supervisor :) One of the other things that my old research group did was crosslinking of hemoglobin which has iron as its central atom vs. magnesium in chlorophyll. I find it pretty amazing the structural similarity between the heme structure for metal ions in these two very different use cases.




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