Summary Shewanella oneidensis is the best understood model organism for the study of dissimilatory iron reduction. This review focuses on the current state of our knowledge regarding this extracellular respiratory process and highlights its physiologic, regulatory and biochemical requirements. It seems that we have widely understood how respiratory electrons can reach the cell surface and what the minimal set of electron transport proteins to the cell surface is. Nevertheless, even after decades of work in different research groups around the globe there are still several important questions that were not answered yet. In particular, the physiology of this organism, the possible evolutionary benefit of some responses to anoxic conditions, as well as the exact mechanism of electron transfer onto solid electron acceptors are yet to be addressed. The elucidation of these questions will be a great challenge for future work and important for the application of extracellular respiration in biotechnological processes. Extracellular respiration is a key factor for the geobiochemical cycling of elements in soil and sediments and enables a variety of microbe–electrode interaction based applications. Shewanella oneidensis is the best understood model organism for extracellular respiration. This review provides an overview of the molecular details of this process and gives insight into the physiological framework of the organism.