Did you know there ’ s a war going on in your body, right now?

1. Did you know there’s a war going on in your body, right now? It’s all about getting and hoarding Iron.

2. A Siderophore “iron carrier” Iron(III) Siderophore ready for transport

3. It’s an arms race between the mammalian immune system and bacteria in the search for iron: a) enterobactin removes iron from transferrin b) siderocalin intercepts the ferric complex of enterobactin c) bacteria produce alternative siderophores such as salmochelin. enterobactin transferrin siderocalin salmochelin

4. Anthrax siderophores http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2006/11/30_siderophore.shtml “Bacterial-Host Iron Wars” BERKELEY – University of California, Berkeley, Bacteria need iron to grow. In iron-poor microenvironments they turn on biosynthetic genes to make, secrete, and retrieve siderophores that scavenge ferric iron from the surroundings. Mammalian hosts fight back by sequestering iron in serum via serum albumin and siderocalin. Some virulent bacteria counterattack by an unusual enzymatic C-glycosylation of the enterobactin scaffold, generating salmochelins (first detected in virulent salmonella) where the bulky glucosyl moiety now abrogates sequestration of this tailored siderophore by siderocalin, allowing retrieval of the iron-loaded form by the bacteria. The new study shows why anthrax bacteria require two siderophores working by two different mechanisms. Siderocalin, the human immune protein, binds bacillibactin and effectively sidelines it, the researchers found. Apparently, anthrax fielded a second "stealth" iron scavenger, petrobactin, to get around the human defense against the first scavenger. Petrobactin is not bound by siderocalin. siderocalin Fe-enterobactin

5. Why do we need all that Fe? Hemes in Hemoglobin and Cytochromes