
New Life Found That Lives Off Electricity (2016) - respinal
https://www.quantamagazine.org/electron-eating-microbes-found-in-odd-places-20160621/
======
mirimir
> The microbes’ apparent ability to ingest electrons — known as direct
> electron transfer — is particularly intriguing because it seems to defy the
> basic rules of biophysics. The fatty membranes that enclose cells act as an
> insulator, creating an electrically neutral zone once thought impossible for
> an electron to cross. “No one wanted to believe that a bacterium would take
> an electron from inside of the cell and move it to the outside,” said
> Kenneth Nealson, a geobiologist at the University of Southern California, in
> a lecture to the Society for Applied Microbiology in London last year.

One could say the same about Na+, K+, and Ca++. So what's so hard to imagine
about electron carriers?

~~~
wavepruner
Mitochondria also pump protons across their membranes in order to synthesize
ATP. They are thought to be descended from bacteria.

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coding123
This is literally the plot to like 5% of all Star Trek TNG episodes. Is there
anything they don't predict?

~~~
cgriswald
Considering the mynocks in The Empire Strikes Back predate STTNG by almost a
decade “predict” seems like a strong word. : )

~~~
benj111
I like Star wars and I like Star Trek, I would never accuse SW of something so
grand as 'predicting' anything though. You have reminded me of my favourite
definition for Soft Sci fi though.

Soft Sci Fi: Han Solo running around around on an asteroid with only a face
mask. (can't find the source right now)

Edit

>"Hard science-fiction” is defined as “stories in which Han Solo does not
saunter around the surface of an asteroid wearing only an oxygen mask and a
leather jacket”

[https://themorningnews.org/article/mindfuck-
movies](https://themorningnews.org/article/mindfuck-movies)

~~~
scardine
Have you watched "The Expanse"? I like that explosions in space does not make
sound and inertia look right in this show, how would you classify it?

~~~
benj111
I havent seen it no.

I've read one or 2 convincing essays that SW is basically fantasy rather than
science fiction. You have princesses getting rescued, and 'magicians', etc.

When you start analysing it, that basically holds. Sci fi should be about
holding up a mirror to contemporary issues, or imagine what may be. I suppose
the hard/soft difference is how rigorously they think about the mechanics of
that, but theres a big grey area in there. I supposes theres an element of no
true Scotsman in there, but these aren't hard and fast rules.

To return to my original comment, I don't think there was ever an attempt to
predict, or realistically portray anything. TNG I would expect to at least
check up on the state of the art was at any particular time. If data uttered
something about doing the kessel run in 12 parsecs, I would expect that to be
in the context of a thought out space folding drive. I'm still not saying that
ST is 'hard' Sci fi, as the multitude of things that happen as you approach
warp 10, or the many ways to travel back in time evidence.

~~~
carapace
How about the Klingon disintegrators that stop at the soles of your boots?

Star Trek is "Wagon Trail" in space. Star Wars is, I think, space opera. The
Expanse gives a nod to hard science, and I respect them for trying, but e.g.
the gravity is always either 1 or 0 g. i'm not complaining, I think realistic
sci-fi would be kind of boring. Like the first half of "2001: A Space
Odyssey", it was basically Dr. Heywood taking a plane. A freaking awesome
_plane to space_ , but still.

I have a "100 Sci-Fi Movies" DVD set with lots of old movies from a span of
decades, and it's pretty clear that at least some sci-fi did start as attempts
to do a kind of scenario planning, but there has always been "speculative
fiction" depending on how you categorize things. Was Plato's Atlantis science
fiction?

~~~
gkfasdfasdf
> e.g. the gravity is always either 1 or 0 g

In the Expanse TV show yes, it seems that way. However I suspect that is more
due to keeping production costs down. In the books, gravity varies all over
the place depending on what moon/planet/rock/station the characters are on,
and even goes into details describing the differences of spin gravity near the
center of a station vs outward.

~~~
carapace
Yes, sorry, that's what I meant: the TV show. Thanks for pointing that out.

At one point they use CGI to show off Coriolis force on the asteroid, and I
took that to be a kind of message from the show, "We know about this stuff but
it's too expensive to do all day every day, so here's some science "fan
service"." Like I said, I respect them for it. :-)

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13of40
"Though eating electricity seems bizarre..."

I think when you get down to the virus and microbe level, there isn't a lot
that's truly analogous to our layperson's understanding of "an animal eating a
chunk of stuff it found".

~~~
ytpete
Right -- like eating _photons_ seems bizarre too when you frame it that way...
Yet we don't find it odd that plants derive energy this way without consuming
physical chunks of stuff.

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WheelsAtLarge
I wonder how long it will be before we can synthesize food directly from
electricity and basic elements? I suspect it's coming relatively soon for
fats.

Imagine a ball of fat plus a glass of water for lunch. Yummy!!! :)

~~~
gibolt
Can't vouch for this company, but it is apparently happening.

[https://solarfoods.fi](https://solarfoods.fi)

They supposedly create "proteins...produced from CO2, water, and electricity."
According to their numbers, yield per unit of water is 10x soy and at least
500x beef.

~~~
saiya-jin
Hmm, looks interesting but I wonder how they actually manufacture proteins. I
mean there are tons of aminoacids, all highly complex structures and body
needs full set of them in good ratios to digest them. I don't see any
technical details on their web, and stuff like "inspired by cleanest air on
earth" means nothing really.

Plus protein are only 1 type of body input - what about carbs, fat, minerals,
vitamins etc.

~~~
moftz
It looks like they also include "nutrients & vitamins" in with the process.
You need nitrogen for protein so I wasn't really sure how they were making
nitrogen from nothing.

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millstone
Life has forever been hiding in plain sight. Microbes too small to see, living
in places we didn't even think to look, surviving off of chemical and
electrical metabolisms we never considered. Our challenge has never been
finding life, it's been recognizing it.

~~~
negamax
Isn't our bodies host to most of such life? I always wondered if microbes
created us i.e. more complex life so they could thrive. They are single celled
and only want to create copies of themselves. Complex life forms like ours
wants to create better version of themselves to tackle the environment. It's a
win for microbes really

~~~
bdamm
Odd sci-fi for the evening; our body is host to many bacteria, including some
which sense the choices of which parallel universes to stay attached to. These
sometimes influence our behavior to stay alive; after all, they want the host
to live, also. Consistency is good for their river of life and death.

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rptr_87
This just reminds me of ... "Life always finds a way" and "Life is nothing but
an electron looking for a place to rest".

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Odenwaelder
Chemolithoautotrophy is the technical term and while it is very interesting
that more of these lifeforms are discovered, it isn't a new thing.

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respinal
Check out the video
[https://youtu.be/3j_gJ2teK5E](https://youtu.be/3j_gJ2teK5E)

~~~
iagovar
Wow, I'm always impressed in which ways life finds its way.

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bwang29
Protomolecules!

~~~
rohan1024
It lives off radiation though. For anyone wandering, OP is talking about
fictional molecule from the series The Expanse.

It's a damn good show. So good that I even wrote a blog post about it!

[https://www.ankshilp.in/post/the_expanse/](https://www.ankshilp.in/post/the_expanse/)

~~~
black_puppydog
Really? After watching the first two seasons, I got around to reading the
first book, and when season 3 rolled around, I just couldn't handle the
unnecessary tv drama any longer.

Kids: go read the books!

~~~
alexanderdmitri
Season 3 was a major drop off from the quality of the first two seasons.

I can't even remember if I finished the third season now that I think about it
...

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kouh
Any followup research? how does the redox tower of these microbes work?

~~~
respinal
Not that I know of, but if I see anything new I am going to share it.

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zw123456
Made me wonder if there is a way to use them to generate electricity somehow?
Could one of these microbes be modified so you could feed it something and it
makes electricity ?

~~~
COGlory
Doubtful. Small scale in a lab? Maybe. There's a reason they had to go a mile
underground to collect a sample. Normal atmospheric conditions are likely
toxic to the organism.

What we're actually after with this kind of thing is enzyme mechanisms.
Enzymes are doing chemistry we've never done in labs before. Maybe we can
replicate that chemistry on an industrial scale to solve some problems.
Particularly the Fe-S clusters are of real interest, as they're responsible
for moving individual (or sometimes pairs) of electrons around.

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benj111
So what are possible use cases for this? Hydrogen production? Batteries?
Electrolysis catalyst?

Or is it 'just' an inefficient oddity?

~~~
COGlory
Well, the existence of an extracellular enzyme that can oxidize iron is pretty
cool. I'm sure we could come up with neat uses for that.

One reason we are looking into these "extremophiles", as they're termed, is
because electron flow at a molecular level is pretty important when it comes
to renewable energy. Things like solar panels and batteries are still
environmentally damaging. The DoD and DoE are both very interested in
experimenting with methanogens, cyanobacteria, etc, to figure out ways to
harness and manipulate electrons from the environment.

The chemical mechanisms these cells employ are typically higher-order and not
super useful. The more low level the interaction (e.g. the NiFe hydrogenase
referenced in the article), the more potentially useful to us. There may not
be one particular plug-and-play use case like there is for say, a PETase, but
we currently don't entirely understand how electrons move around in an ordered
way, and so elucidating that mechanism is a high priority. At this point we
have it narrowed down to Fe-S clusters in enzymes, and some particular organic
intermediates.

As with any process of discovery, the lower-level the organism we can
investigate, the hopefully clearer picture we can generate.

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rdbell
The progress-bar at the top of the page that shows how much reading you have
left is pretty neat UX.

I bet "gamifying" the process of reading an article to completion like that
encourages longer visit times too. I'd like to see an A/B comparison of how
long a visitor stays on the page with & without that element.

~~~
ralusek
Isn't the scrollbar to the right of most articles a similar function?

~~~
samplatt
Not if two thirds of the length of the page is taken up by comments.

~~~
rohan1024
Ads and ridiculously long sidebar

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zakki
This video said that they found geobecter bacterium that also produce
electricity 30 years ago on 2017. Also they said it is everywhere.

[https://youtu.be/l1MuDYc0D2Q](https://youtu.be/l1MuDYc0D2Q)

Seems different with this one posted here.

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tmaly
I could imagine them modifying the microbes genetically to make something from
this process

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twic
> Humans and many other organisms get electrons from food and expel them with
> our breath.

What

~~~
gus_massa
It sorta make sense as a redox reaction
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redox) ,
but it's more difficult to explain in easy terms than what I though.

For simplicity, let's imagine that you eat methane. The reactions is

    
    
      CH4(food) + 3 * O2(air)  --> CO2 + 2 * H2O
    

For simplicity, let's imagine that The Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen are more
"happy" when they are in a state like in CO2 and H2O. And for simplicity, you
split the bound in the molecules and assign a fictional charge to the atoms

    
    
      CO2 ~~> C{4+} + 2 * O{2-}
      H2O ~~> 2* H{+} + O{2-}
    

So in the "happy" state:

* the Oxygen has a fake charge or -2, i.e. it has two additional electron.

* the Carbon has a fake charge or +4, i.e. it has four electrons less the neutral version.

* the Hydrogen has a fake charge or +1, i.e. it has one electron less the neutral version.

Now, how do you decompose the methane in the food:

    
    
      CH4 ~~> C{4+} + 4* H{+} + 12 * e-
    

[Important: This is _not_ the standard notation. Don't use it in a midterm!]

So if you decompose the methane molecule using "happy" atoms, it has 12 more
electrons than what you expect. So in some sense, with each methane molecule
you get 12 additional electrons.

The oxygen molecule decompose as

    
    
      O2 ~~> 2* O{2-} - 4 * e-
    
    

Note the minus sign. Each one "wants" 4 electrons.[Important: This is _not_
the standard notation. Never ever a minus operator in a midterm!!!]

So the 12 electrons travel from the methane in the food to the oxygen you have
breathed. (I'm not so convinced to use "expel" here.)

With more realistic food the equation is bigger an more difficult, the number
of electrons and oxygens molecules change, but it's the same idea.

You can even follow how the electrons travel in the reactions in the
mitochondria,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_transport_chain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_transport_chain)
in each step they release a small amount of energy that is collected. [This is
a technical detail of the biological part, you can't release a lot of energy
altogether and pack it later.]

[Important: Again, this is _not_ the standard notation. Use the standard
notation in a midterm. The question was more difficult to explain than I
expected I had to use not standard notation. I hope it's clear enough to read
the standard notation and understand the idea.]

~~~
twic
I feel bad for making you write all this out.

This is still not "get electrons from food and expel them with our breath", is
it? We are not stocking up electrons in our bodies, using them somehow, then
exhaling spent electrons.

What we are doing is taking in matter with a certain amount of chemical
potential, putting out matter with less chemical potential, and capturing the
difference. Electrons are intimately involved in this, but they're a bit of an
implementation detail.

~~~
gus_massa
If you think it as a battery of a fuel cell, you care about the voltage and
the charge, not about if it has Lithium or not. In general in the redox
reactions (and in batteries) you don't care too much to which atom the
electrons are bound (unless you have to build one). So the electrons are the
important thing and the molecules are the implementation detail.

> _What we are doing is taking in matter with a certain amount of chemical
> potential, putting out matter with less chemical potential, and capturing
> the difference. Electrons are intimately involved in this, but they 're a
> bit of an implementation detail._

You are totally correct too. :) It's equivalente to the previos point of view
where the electrons are the important part and the molecules are the
implementation detail. It is just that sometimes it is easier to think from
one point of view and other times it's easier to think from the other point of
view.

(Essentially, Volt = Energy / Charge. Since the charge of the electron is
fixed, you can convert easily (or use eV to measure the energy).)

\---

If you think about the methane as a charged battery and the carbon dioxide as
a discharged battery, then the idea is that the high potencial electron comes
from the food and go away as low potencial electrons in the breath. I'm not
100% happy with this analogy, I think I understand it, but I'm not happy. You
are not accumulating electrons.

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xenorplxx
Uhm.. there was this show, Revolution.. Just sayin' :D.

~~~
wruza
Sadly it was discontinued so fast. The plot was pretty cool and refreshing, if
you ignore few boring social details. (Or it was a preparation for something
special, we’ll never know.)

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GaurVimen
Layman here...Is it possible life could likely live in the emptiness space as
well then?

~~~
namanyayg
Where life == self replicating information? Yes, quite unlikely, but yes.
Along these lines, see Boltzmann brains.

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coldtea
So, like power company employees?

