Abstract
Life depends on the ability of living organisms to make efficient use of the chemical potential of their environment: the sun, for energy, and a number of molecules accumulated on the earth's surface (water, oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, etc.). To take advantage of these, they need to be activated, and this requires profound electronic modifications that only metal ions can provide. The metalloenzymes that carry out these activations are truly extraordinary, and their mechanisms of action extremely subtle. At the interface of chemistry and biology, bioinorganic chemistry is currently expanding rapidly. It was born of the relatively recent realization that life is not only organic, but also "mineral": there can be no life without metals.
