Join us weekly to read and learn about Delftia topics!
As a way to spark conversation and initiate discovery, we are going to present weekly questions about Delftia and its many characteristics and abilities! We hope to explore the unknown about this mysterious bacteria, and will be using these questions to guide our quest for knowledge. If you haven’t annotated with Hypothes.is before, check our guide to get started here.
We are going to start by looking at the peptide that Delftia produces to biomineralize gold. This peptide, delftibactin, has been observed to interact with iron. This makes delftibactin a siderophore: a biomolecule with iron interactions.
Iron is abundant at the Earth’s surface, but is hard to acquire due to its solubility. This makes iron a limiting nutrient for microbes, plants, and animals. Siderophores are thought to be an evolutionary response to the appearance of atmospheric oxygen, which created new, oxidized forms of iron such as Fe(II) and Fe(III).
Iron could possibly affect how Delftia biomineralizes gold, kills other bacteria, promotes plant growth, or other aspects yet unknown! Annotate literature with Hypothes.is, and tag your annotations with the tag iron.