Manganese

Manganese is a chemical element, designated by the symbol Mn.. It is found as a free element in nature (often in combination with iron), and in many minerals. As a free element, manganese is a metal with important industrial metal alloy uses. Manganese ions are variously colored, and are used industrially as pigments and as oxidation chemicals. Manganese (II) ions function as cofactors for a number of enzymes; the element is thus a required trace mineral for all known living organisms.

Biological Role

Manganese is an essential trace nutrient in all forms of life

The classes of enzymes that have manganese cofactors are very broad and include such classes as oxidoreductases, transferases, hydrolases, lyases, isomerases, ligases, lectins, and integrins. The reverse transcriptases of many retroviruses (though not lentiviruses such as HIV) contain manganese. The best known manganese-containing polypeptides may be arginase, the diptheria toxin, and Mn-containing superoxide dismutase (Mn-SOD).

Mn-SOD is the type of SOD present in eukaryotic mitochondria, and also in most bacteria (this fact is in keeping with the bacterial-origin theory of mitochondria). The Mn-SOD enzyme is probably one of the most ancient, for nearly all organisms living in the presence of oxygen use it to deal with the toxic effects of superoxide, formed from the 1-electron reduction of dioxygen. Exceptions include a few kinds of bacteria such as Lactobacillusplantarum and related lactobacillii, which use a different non-enzymatic mechanism, involving manganese (Mn²⁺) ions complexed with polyphosphate directly for this task, indicating how this function possibly evolved in aerobic life.

The human body contains about 10 mg of manganese, which is stored mainly in liver and kidneys.

Manganese is also important in photosynthetic oxygen evolution in chloroplasts in plants, which are also evolutionarily of bacterial origin. The oxygen evolving complex (OEC), a water-oxidizing enzyme contained in chloroplast membrane, and which is involved in the terminal photooxidation of water during the light reactions of photosynthesis, has a metalloenzyme core containing four atoms of manganese. For this reason, most broad-spectrum plant fertilizers contain manganese.

Manganese is found in the following products:

ANDRO-VITO

EREXUS

LOVE FIRE