Biological complexity: microbes making electricity (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, February 01, 2022, 19:39 (1026 days ago) @ David Turell

From rocks!:

https://phys.org/news/2022-02-microbes-electrical-world-growth-power.html

"In more recent years, scientists have discovered an astonishing new process by which microbes can "breathe" rocks through a process called extracellular electron transfer (EET). With EET microbes are able to "breathe" rocks and other materials that are outside their cell. In other words, microbes literally establish an electrical connection to the outside world, a connection they use to generate the power they need to grow. Researchers have since found groundbreaking uses for EET-capable microbes, such as aiding in toxic waste cleanup and as a source of alternative.

"In a new study in mBio, researchers from Harvard and the University of Minnesota surveyed the tree of life in search of EET and discovered it is far more widespread than previously thought and is spread through horizontal gene transfer. One set of genes that makes EET possible, called mtrCAB, has been especially well-studied in the bacterium Shewanella oneidensis. Shewanella oneidensis was one of the first EET-capable organisms ever discovered. As such, it's had a decades-long head start for the science community to interrogate it in the lab.

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"'We found these genes in microbes all over the planet from virtually every kind of environment, including the deep sea, salt flats, oil refinery sites, the human gut, and even wastewater contaminated by the Manhattan project," Baker said. Further analysis revealed that the set of genes were horizontally transferred extensively throughout the history of life.

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"'It's sort of a foregone conclusion that microbes really shape our planet and EET had always been viewed as a niche ability," Girguis said. "But we looked at all of the genomic information from animals, Archaea, and bacteria, and all other forms of life and found it's far more widespread than previously assumed. All of the organisms we identified are capable of plugging directly into the substrates in their environment and changing what's available there."

"'The availability of these different substrates change over time as the Earth continues to evolve, either naturally or from human impact," Baker said. "Understanding how these proteins may have coevolved with the history of oxygen on earth is very important. It could help us understand if this metabolism, or a metabolism like this, helped play a role in one of the massive transformations of our planet's surface that gave rise to the modern world as we know it.'"

Comment: I've presented articles about these guys before and considered them extremeophiles. guess they are too common for that title. Life has all sorts of ways to survive.