Abstract
Iron is essential for aerobic organisms. Additionally, photosynthetic organisms must maintain the iron-rich photosynthetic electron transport chain, which likely evolved in the iron-replete Proterozoic ocean. The subsequent rise in oxygen since those times has drastically decreased the levels of bioavailable iron, indicating that adaptations have been made to maintain sufficient cellular iron levels in the midst of scarcity. In combination with physiological studies, the recent sequencing of marine microorganism genomes and transcriptomes has begun to reveal the mechanisms of iron acquisition and utilization that allow marine microalgae to persist in iron limited environments.
Highlights
Iron is essential for all aerobic organisms, but is highly reactive and toxic via the Fenton reaction (Halliwell and Gutteridge, 1992)
While metagenomic approaches have begun to reveal the diversity of bacteria in the oceans (e.g., Venter et al, 2004; Frias-Lopez et al, 2008; Zehr et al, 2008), the physiological characterization of iron homeostasis in free-living marine cyanobacteria has been primarily limited to the diazotrophs Trichodesmium and Crocosphaera watsonii, and the non-diazotrophs Synechococcus and Prochlorococcus
Transcriptome level analysis similar to those described above will be performed to determine which genes play a role in iron homeostasis
Summary
Ecole Normale Supérieur, Institut de Biologie de l’ENS, Paris, France Inserm U1024, Paris, France CNRS UMR 8197, Paris, France. Reviewed by: Tom Bibby, University of Southampton, UK Adrian Marchetti, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. Photosynthetic organisms must maintain the iron-rich photosynthetic electron transport chain, which likely evolved in the ironreplete Proterozoic ocean. The subsequent rise in oxygen since those times has drastically decreased the levels of bioavailable iron, indicating that adaptations have been made to maintain sufficient cellular iron levels in the midst of scarcity. In combination with physiological studies, the recent sequencing of marine microorganism genomes and transcriptomes has begun to reveal the mechanisms of iron acquisition and utilization that allow marine microalgae to persist in iron limited environments
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