Light Accelerates Conductivity In Nature's 'Electric Grid'
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The natural world possesses its own intrinsic electrical grid composed of a global web of tiny bacteria-generated nanowires in the soil and oceans that "breathe" by exhaling excess electrons.
In a new study, Yale University researchers discovered that light is a surprising ally in fostering this electronic activity within biofilm bacteria. Exposing bacteria-produced nanowires to light, they found, yielded an up to a 100-fold increase in electrical conductivity.
[...] Almost all living things breathe oxygen to get rid of excess electrons when converting nutrients into energy. Without access to oxygen, however, soil bacteria living deep under oceans or buried underground over billions of years have developed a way to respire by "breathing minerals," like snorkeling, through tiny protein filaments called nanowires.
When bacteria were exposed to light, the increase in electrical current surprised researchers because most of the bacteria tested exist deep in the soil, far from the reach of light. Previous studies had shown that when exposed to light nanowire-producing bacteria grew faster.
[...] "It is a completely different form of photosynthesis," Malvankar said. "Here, light is accelerating breathing by bacteria due to rapid electron transfer between nanowires."
Malvankar's lab is exploring how this insight into bacterial electrical conductivity could be used to spur growth in optoelectronics-a subfield of photonics that studies devices and systems that find and control light-and capture methane, a greenhouse gas known to be a significant contributor to global climate change.
Journal Reference:
Neu, J., Shipps, C.C., Guberman-Pfeffer, M.J. et al. Microbial biofilms as living photoconductors due to ultrafast electron transfer in cytochrome OmcS nanowires. Nat Commun 13, 5150 (2022). 10.1038/s41467-022-32659-5
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