Plant Science When iron is limited, photosynthetic pathways are remodeled to accommodate the deficit. Iron transport systems and alternative redox carriers are mobilized. Georg et al. now show that a 68-nucleotide small RNA named iron-stress-activated RNA1 (IsaR1) is central to this accommodation in the cyanobacterium Synechocystis . IsaR1 is conserved across cyanobacterial species and expressed in response to iron starvation. With iron deprivation, IsaR1 adjusts components of photosynthetic electron transfer, pigment biosynthesis, and Fe-S cluster biogenesis to make the most of the available light with the materials at hand. Curr. Biol. 27 , 1425 (2017)