ABSTRACT
Industrial and human activities have greatly increased the health risks associated with exposure to heavy metals. Transcriptional events are susceptible to environmental metals and their disturbance may result in perturbations in the regulation of gene expression. During the past decade, zinc finger proteins (ZFPs) have emerged as the largest class of transcription factors involved in the control of many aspects of life. Zinc fingers are structural motifs found in several classes of proteins proposed
to function in eukaryotic protein-nucleic acid interactions such as gene expression and DNA repair (Pabo and Sauer, 1992; O’Conner et al., 1993; Beckmann and Wilce, 1997).
