Enterobactin: an archetype for microbial iron transport.

Department of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-1460, USA. raymond@socrates.berkeley.edu

Bacteria have aggressive acquisition processes for iron, an essential nutrient. Siderophores are small iron chelators that facilitate cellular iron transport. The siderophore enterobactin is a triscatechol derivative of a cyclic triserine lactone. Studies of the chemistry, regulation, synthesis, recognition, and transport of enterobactin make it perhaps the best understood of the siderophore-mediated iron uptake systems, displaying a lot of function packed into this small molecule. However, recent surprises include the isolation of corynebactin, a closely related trithreonine triscatechol derivative lactone first found in Gram-positive bacteria, and the crystal structure of a ferric enterobactin complex of a protein identified as an antibacterial component of the human innate immune system.

PMID: 12655062 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

PMCID: PMC152965