Rodriguez G Marcela
TB Center, The Public Health Research Institute at the International Center for Public Health, 225 Warren St, Newark, NJ 07103, USA.
Trends Microbiol. 2006 Jul;14(7):320-7. doi: 10.1016/j.tim.2006.05.006. Epub 2006 Jun 6.
Tuberculosis continues to kill millions of people around the world. New tools to prevent and treat this disease are urgently needed. Similar to most microorganisms, Mycobacterium tuberculosis--the causative agent of tuberculosis--requires iron for essential metabolic pathways. Because iron is not freely available in the host, pathogens must actively compete for this metal to establish an infection but they must also carefully control iron acquisition as excess free iron can be extremely toxic. Recent studies have demonstrated that failure to assemble the iron acquisition machinery or to repress iron uptake has deleterious effects for M. tuberculosis. Here, we review how M. tuberculosis obtains iron in a regulated manner and discuss how these processes could potentially be disrupted to interfere with the survival and replication of this bacterium in the host.
结核病在全球范围内仍致使数百万人死亡。迫切需要预防和治疗这种疾病的新工具。与大多数微生物相似，结核分枝杆菌——结核病的病原体——在基本代谢途径中需要铁。由于铁在宿主体内并非 freely available，病原体必须积极竞争这种金属以建立感染，但它们也必须小心控制铁的获取，因为过量的游离铁可能极具毒性。最近的研究表明，未能组装铁获取机制或抑制铁摄取对结核分枝杆菌具有有害影响。在这里，我们综述了结核分枝杆菌如何以一种受调控的方式获取铁，并讨论了这些过程如何可能被破坏以干扰这种细菌在宿主体内的存活和复制。
