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Bacteria As Fuel Cells?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed May 24, 2006 05:26 PM
from the lazy-bacteria-just-needs-training dept.
from the lazy-bacteria-just-needs-training dept.
KantIsDead writes "MIT's Tech Review is running an interview with Boston University Bioengineer Tim Gardner about the possibility of using bacteria to produce electricity. If fuel cells running off sugar are nearly here, alcohol-powered robots cannot be far." From the article: "While typical fuel cells use hydrogen as fuel, separating out electrons to create electricity, bacteria can use a wide variety of nutrients as fuel. Some species, such as Shewanella oneidensis and Rhodoferax ferrireducens, turn these nutrients directly into electrons. Indeed, scientists have already created experimental microbial fuel cells that can run off glucose and sewage. Although these microscopic organisms are remarkably efficient at producing energy, they don't make enough of it for practical applications."
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They don't produce enough gas for practical use? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They don't produce enough gas for practical use (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:They don't produce enough gas for practical use (Score:2)
It would be cannibalism! Taco Bell's meat is already a lower grade than dog food, and full of bugs (cockroach eggs, anyone?)
Obligatory Futurama Reference (Score:4, Funny)
Bacteria As Fuel Cells? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Bacteria As Fuel Cells? (Score:5, Funny)
Naw, the only thing we've established is that the poster is an invertebrate punster. So slug him!
Parent
Re:Bacteria As Fuel Cells? (Score:3, Insightful)
Considering bacteria belong to the kingdom Monera and not Animalia, I doubt that.
Re:Bacteria As Fuel Cells? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Can someone explain? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Can someone explain? (Score:5, Informative)
Take glucose - perhaps produced by a bacteria, or as also mentioned in the article available in the human blood stream and using a glucose oxidase enzyme - oxidise it - take electrons from it, you do this on the surface of an electrode at one end of the circuit - at the other end you have another electrode coated with another enzyme on that uses electrons to reduce someting - such as oxygen to water. With oxidation at one end and reduction at the other you have electrons flowing between them.
A paper describing doing this - but not using real human blood [acs.org] (why doesn't someone get on and do that - has the human race lost the spirit of development??)
Why use bacteria and not just enzymes? One answer maybe that enzymes need a specific substrate, some bacteria might be less choosey? An enzyme's only a catalyst why not use "chemical" catalysts like conventional fuel cells?
As for the biology major's worry that bacteria will lose the genetic modifications over time - yes that will happen - as the modifications that make them better for the purpose of making electricity will make them less good at simply multiplying - so loosing the extra function will give them an advantage which will be naturally selected for - so those bacteria will take over the culture. The solution's - you'll just not grow these things indefinatly - you'll have get a fresh culture of them regularly.Parent
Re:Can someone explain? (Score:2)
I am more impressed (Score:5, Interesting)
I am more impressed with that Montreal kid who did something similiar:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70882-0.ht
Kartik Madiraju, an 11th-grader from Montreal, was able to generate about half the voltage of a normal AA battery with a fifth of an ounce of naturally occurring magnetic bacteria. And the bacteria kept pumping current for 48 hours nonstop.
Re:I am more impressed (Score:3, Interesting)
But how do you ge
Re:I am more impressed (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Can you smell the future? (Score:5, Funny)
"glucose and sewage"
The future will be full of cars that only exaust water....and fueling stations brimming with switch-grass, corn-mash, stale beer, human feces, and the occasional Rhodoferax ferrireducens bateria. And I thought horses smelled bad....
Re:Can you smell the future? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Can you smell the future? (Score:2)
>brimming with switch-grass, corn-mash, stale beer, human feces, and the
> occasional Rhodoferax ferrireducens bateria
The future? Obviously, you have never been in a typical Tennessee gas station...
Brett
Mutations (Score:5, Interesting)
enough colonies of them to be useful. How do we stop them from just mutating into
non-viable types of their former selves and corrupting the colony? Sure they would
reproduce asexually and that would limit mutations compared to our dirty process
with gametes and zygotes, but that small rate of mutation will definitely be amplified
by the apparent fact that we'll need trillions of these bacteria to do anything large-scale.
IAABM (I am a biology major)
Re:Mutations (Score:3, Funny)
with gametes and zygotes,
Bacteria can reproduce sexually as well. There's no stopping the horny little bastards.
If you provide an constant, optimum climate for your strain, however, there wouldn't be a great deal of evolutionary pressure forcing them to mutate into non-viable types.
Re:Mutations (Score:2)
For example, consider a mutation that was better at reproducing but not at all good at generating us electricity/fuel/whatever. It could rapidly "corrupt" the population.
Not sure about that. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure this is a good assumption. If the bacteria were a product of genetic engineering and not selective breeding in that environment, they might be easily overwhelmed by a mutant strain that was more suited to the environment, but less useful to us. For example, we might engineer bacteria that produce electricity, but do it at the
Re:Mutations (Score:3, Insightful)
Or just use a fresh starter of bacteria for each batch. That's basically what bakers do today with yeasts: in the past, a good bakery would have had a 'starter' filled with yeast, which they'd put a small piece of into each b
Re:Mutations (Score:2)
Make bacteria dependent i.e lac operon, etc (Score:4, Insightful)
It would be unlikely for the bacteria to spontaneously mutate out 2 genes at once, thereby subverting our design. Obviously bacteria, number in the billions, so it will be necessary to restock our fuel cell occasionally. Of course you could be clever and tie in a third gene that gives immunity to a toxic substance, so that non-desired mutated bacteria are killed off automatically.
Parent
Re:Make bacteria dependent i.e lac operon, etc (Score:2)
Keep breeding (Score:2)
Re:Mutations (Score:3, Insightful)
When (not if) it happens, we kill the results and don't let them breed.
Why do you think it'll be any different with the bacteria? It's not as if all the bacteria in the world will be in one tank in one gigantic, completely inseperable pile.
Re:Mutations (Score:2)
pffffft (Score:3, Funny)
Re:pffffft (Score:2)
Medical implants (Score:5, Interesting)
1) What if the bacteria escape from the implant and spread through my body?
2) Could an antibiotic cure for an unrelated infection kill my artificial heart?
Re:Medical implants (Score:2)
Re:Medical implants (Score:3, Insightful)
Your immune system deals with them. If they're not optimized to reproduce in that environment, there wouldn't even be much risk of "spread". Not all bacterias thrive in the human body, after all.
2) Could an antibiotic cure for an unrelated infection kill my artificial heart?
Presumably your artificial heart's bacterial power source would not be exposed to your body, any more than today's artifical hearts press their battery leads rig
Re:Medical implants (Score:2)
Think of an implant that burns glucose in the blood and either remotely powers gadgets or keeps you extra warm. Just the burning calories part will make people rich. How about breast implants that will burn your calories for you to produce extra body heat?
Re:Medical implants (Score:2)
Bacteria as fuel cells... (Score:5, Funny)
Neither can power plugs that you can directly plug into your ass [wikipedia.org] after ingesting healthy amounts of symbiotic bacteria.
Re:Bacteria as fuel cells... (Score:2)
It's called "feet".
Once we get commodity alcohol fuel cells. . . (Score:2)
(I am Bender. Please insert beer.)
Methane vs Hydrogen (Score:5, Interesting)
http://technocrat.net/d/2006/5/23/3693 [technocrat.net]
bacteria + rotting biomass has long been able to produce energy.
I can see this is new because it produces hydrogen as opposed to other gasses, but is a hydrogen economy that much better than a methane economy if it is based on biomass?
Maybe in 50 years time?
Ok I'll mod myself Troll now...
I'm back, baby ! (Score:2)
I'm back, baby ! My friends and I were just in this bar, right around the corner !
-- Bender
Keep Quite About It! (Score:4, Funny)
No one tell the computers, or they won't have any reason to keep us alive after they take over.
Plus the bacteria won't need an elaborate VR to keep them occupied while generating electricity.
Bacteria Can't Scale? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's something wrong with this sentence. It sounds like they're saying that the bacteria perform an efficient conversion of the sugar energy into electrical energy, but that the problem is that bacteria can't be scaled effectively to produce significant amounts of power.
There's a problem with the idea that bacteria don't scale. Bacteria are well known for their exponential growth curves. Give me a sufficently large petri dish with medium and a starter batch of bacteria, and I'll solve your scaling dilemma.
If they are truly efficient, then there's no problem with bacteria not making enough power, as making more bacteria is trivial. However, I don't think it's likely they really are efficient. It seems highly unlikely bacteria would waste much energy on producing unused electricity, one might expect them, like most living things, to use most of their available energy growing, respirating, reproducing, and anything else that generally falls under the category of "surviving." Sure enough, later in the article comes:
Gardner's team aims to harness the genetic control system to engineer bacteria that can produce energy more efficiently.
Which makes me think that the problem with the current bacteria is efficiency, not scalability, as the first sentence implies. Perhaps by "efficient" he means that they don't produce a lot of waste heat or something, but for generating electricity, the definition of efficiency should be what percent of the energy they take in they put back out as electricity.
Re:Bacteria Can't Scale? (Score:2, Interesting)
_microwatts_ of power.
Tim's great (he gave an impassioned sermon on 'The End of Oil'... in his nonlinear dynamics class!) and he's in it for the long haul, but they're not there yet.
At last (Score:4, Funny)
Piss in the gas tank (Score:4, Funny)
alcohol-powered robot (Score:3, Funny)
Some of them work in the cubicle next to mine...
Microbial Fuel Cells, Geobacter and UMass/Amherst (Score:2)
In addition to their work on the microbial fuel cells [geobacter.org] themselves, they've also made the interesting discovery that the bacteria naturally form nanowires [geobacter.org] to transfer electrons outside the cell--something potentially [sorry!] useful to connect to an external electrode.
Why not just use water? (Score:2)
Water Fuel Cell [waterfuelcell.org]
Re:what about waste? (Score:2)
Re:Awsome (Score:2, Informative)