Ironing out the problem: new mechanisms of iron homeostasis

For most organisms, iron is an essential nutrient that is both difficult to acquire from the environment and toxic at high concentration. Therefore, to avoid deprivation or over-abundance of iron, bacteria and eukaryotes have developed a tight regulatory system to keep the metal within a narrow concentration range. Recent work in the bacteria Escherichia coli and in Pseudomonas aeruginosa has demonstrated that small regulatory RNAs function post-transcriptionally to repress iron-using proteins, thereby ensuring that limited iron resources are allocated to crucial cellular functions during iron starvation. Following this discovery, a parallel mechanism that uses a protein and not a small RNA was described in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae under iron restriction. The common characteristics of these three different organisms suggest a novel mechanism of iron homeostasis.