Natures wonders: electron-eating bacteria (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, July 19, 2014, 00:49 (3779 days ago) @ David Turell

Living only on energy:-http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25894-meet-the-electric-life-forms-that-live-on-pure-energy.html#.U8mtCfl3KM5--"Over at the University of Minnesota in St Paul, Daniel Bond and his colleagues have published experiments showing that they could grow a type of bacteria that harvested electrons from an iron electrode (mBio, doi.org/tqg). That research, says Jangir's supervisor Moh El-Naggar, may be the most convincing example we have so far of electricity eaters grown on a supply of electrons with no added food.-"But Nealson says there is much more to come. His PhD student Annette Rowe has identified up to eight different kinds of bacteria that consume electricity. Those results are being submitted for publication.-"Nealson is particularly excited that Rowe has found so many types of electric bacteria, all very different to one another, and none of them anything like Shewanella or Geobacter. "This is huge. What it means is that there's a whole part of the microbial world that we don't know about."-"Discovering this hidden biosphere is precisely why Jangir and El-Naggar want to cultivate electric bacteria. "We're using electrodes to mimic their interactions," says El-Naggar. "Culturing the 'unculturables', if you will." The researchers plan to install a battery inside a gold mine in South Dakota to see what they can find living down there."