Understanding Zinc Finger Proteins

But they never talk about the why. One of the key

molecular structures that all of us have in our

bodies is something called a zinc finger.

It's a particular

structure in a protein, and it's used to

interact with other proteins and also sometimes to

engage in certain types of chemical reactions.

It's an-- it's basically a key

element in protein structure that allows,

we could say, proteins to talk to other proteins.

And zinc fingers, uh, require

zinc to form that structure. You can't

form a zinc finger with just the protein part.

You have to have the zinc compound in its

divalent cation state in order to coordinate this.