Iron-Source Preference of Staphylococcus aureus Infections

Although bacteria use different iron compounds in vitGro, the possibility that microbes distinguish between these iron sources during infection has hitherto not been examined. We applied stable isotope labeling to detect source-specific iron by mass spectrometry and show that Staphylococcus aureus preferentially imports heme iron over transferrin iron. By combining this approach with computational genome analysis, we identified hts (heme...