When humans have low iron levels, they tend to feel weak, fatigued and dizzy.
When humans have low iron levels, they tend to feel weak, fatigued and dizzy. This fatigue prevents patients with iron-deficient anemia from exercising or exerting themselves in order to conserve energy.
Similarly, in low-iron environments, microbes survive by slowing down carbon processing and extracting iron from minerals. However, this strategy requires microbes to invest precious food sources into producing mineral-dissolving compounds. Given this paradox, researchers wanted to understand how microbes sustain survival strategies in environments with too little iron to thrive.
Iron is critical to carbon metabolism because it’s required by the proteins involved in processing carbon. But because oxygen makes soluble iron less abundant in the environment, bacteria often operate under iron limitation and need to shut down or dramatically decrease carbon intake.
Looking at a group of bacteria from soil, researchers at Northwestern University discovered that these organisms overcome limitation in their carbon processing machinery by rerouting their metabolic pathways to favor producing iron-scavenging compounds. The study is the first to use metabolomics, a high-resolution technique to monitor carbon flow in the cells, to study the impact of iron on the carbon cycling in bacterial cells.
Read more at: Northwestern University
Photo Credit: Jing via Pixabay
