Meet Professor Simon Andrews

Throughout this course you’ll meet a range of experts from the School of Biological Sciences at The University of Reading and hear about their current research.

In this video I join Professor Simon Andrews, a medical microbiologist, in one of our teaching labs. Simon’s research focuses on the ways in which bacteria obtain iron from their environment, and in particular the battle for iron inside a human host. I ask Simon how these bacteria set about acquiring this vital nutrient and what tactics their human hosts use to defend themselves against such attacks.

In humans, iron plays an essential role partly because it is a component of the oxygen-carrying molecule haemoglobin in red blood cells.

Bacteria don’t have blood or haemoglobin, so why do they need iron? Share your thoughts in the comment area below.

Advanced further reading

• The Battle for Iron between Bacterial Pathogens and Their Vertebrate Hosts paper by Eric P. Skaar.

Note: If you’ve turned on the subtitles for the videos in the course, you may have noticed that the scientific (binomial) names for species are not in italics. Unfortunately the sub-titling software doesn’t include an option for italics, but we have correctly formatted the names in the accompanying transcripts.