Electrically Conducting Bacteria

[BillTre]

TL;DR Summary

This article describes the developing awareness of bacteria that conduct electricity in different ways to make use of the redox energy in physically separated areas.

This news article in Science magazine describes what is becoming known about the different kinds of bacteria that can do this, what is known about how they do it, and how people might make use of the phenomena.
The bacteria conduct electricity through either small nano-filaments sticking out from individual cells or in cables formed of protein "wires" around a string of bacteria.

Their chemical abilities expand the possibilities of the ecology (as a set of biological reactions, in an area, using available energy) to make use of these, otherwise under-utilized, environmental energy sources.

I remain curious about how the bacteria through out the length of the cable get benefit from being part of the cable where they just appear to passing the electrons along the chain.

 

[DaveE]

Aaagh! %$@&#! paywall. This sounds really interesting.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6506/894.full

 

[TeethWhitener]

Aaagh! %$@&#! paywall. This sounds really interesting.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6506/894.full

Here's the wiki page on cable bacteria:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_bacteria
They are pretty interesting. I have some colleagues working on them now. There are a lot of open questions and it's getting to be a pretty hot research area. Expect to see significant work done on them in the next few years.

 

[BillTre]

Dang! Must have been sleepy when I posted this.
Here's the link to the news article which should not be behind a pay-wall unless you go there too often (few times a month free I think).
As a AAAS member, I think these articles should be open access in an unlimited manner. It's good PR for science in general.

Interestingly to me:
This making use of redox differences between different chemicals (in different locations, unusually in this case), is the basis of what drives the great variety of microbial metabolisms.

As long as a bacteria (or archaea) can generate a metabolism that harvests energy (from a sufficiently large redox difference, to drive particular cellular reactions) from these reactions, they can evolve ways to plug electron donors and electron acceptors into the biologically universal electron transfer chain, which in turn drives cell energy generation.
I would expect cells to somehow get make some use of these electrons going by to drive the ETS, but don't know how this might work.