Bacteria have many ways of stealing iron from the organisms they infect. But this thievery is not one-sided, and a newly discovered device in the mammalian tool kit does a good job of keeping bacteria in check. A fierce battle rages between man and microbe over iron. The breakthrough reported by Flo and colleagues on page 917 of this issue exemplifies the lengths to which microorganisms must go to obtain iron — and the remarkable ingenuity of our own natural countermeasures for denying them this essential metal. So far, humans are winning, and we're doing it with a member of an obscure family of proteins called the lipocalins.
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