Essential and Ubiquitous: The Emergence of Lanthanide Metallobiochemistry.

Lanthanide biochemistry-A surprise around every corner: lanthanides as biologically essential metals. This statement was until recently, unthinkable. This minireview presents the recent developments in the emerging field of rare-earth element biochemistry from a coordination chemist's point of view and discusses why nature might have chosen these elements to have a catalytic role in alcohol dehydrogenase enzymes as they are found in methanotrophic and methylotrophic bacteria.