Tech

They managed to produce electricity from “nothing”

March 15, 2023
Regina Preston

Let’s stay with this name: Mycobacterium smear. It comes to A common soil-dwelling bacterium. Some bacteria – like this one – are capable of producing electricity from small concentrations of hydrogen in the atmosphere. After identifying the responsible enzyme, a team of scientists from Monash University in Australia discovered it an enzyme that can convert hydrogen in the air into electricity; This means that electricity can be produced without the need for the rest of the organism: only through an enzyme.

Clean energy sources

The discovery could allow not only the possibility to charge devices with small amounts of electricity generated by a single enzyme, but also More efficient capture of energy stored in the form of hydrogen and could lead to a new way to mass-produce energy in certain friendly places. A discovery that will undoubtedly help us move away from fossil fuels and embrace other non-carbon sources of energy.

problem Available clean energy Like solar power or wind power is that they suffer from intermittence problems. With an enzyme-based device, we can remove this error from the equation by being able to Turn on and off at will Like a generator.

electricityiStock

normal battery

called an enzyme takeHydrogen gas can be converted into electric current. Then thanks for Electron microscope cryo-EM — which led its developers to win a Nobel Prize in 2017 — has determined the enzyme’s molecular structure. This technique consists in cooling the sample to cryogenic temperatures, below -150 °C, bombarded with electrons. With electrochemistry, it was finally shown that the enzyme can function even at concentrations as low as 0.00005 percent in air. Real success.

Huc is extraordinarily efficient. Unlike all other known enzymes and chemical agents, it consumes hydrogen below atmospheric levels.only 0.00005% of the air we breatheexplains Rhys Grinter, of Monash University’s Biomedical Discovery Institute and co-author of work published in the journal nature.

How it works?

The enzyme attaches to hydrogen and allows it to be oxidized, a reaction in which it loses electrons before passing them on to vitamin menaquinone, or K2.. what happened after that? Menaquinones can transfer electrons to a bacterial membrane or other electrode, producing an electric current as if it were a “natural battery”.

One of the things scientists have discovered is that the enzyme is incredibly flexible: It survives freezing or heating up to 80°C; Some kind of adaptation almost like tardigrades, perhaps to help these bacteria survive Survive in the toughest environments on the planet.

Fortunately, the Huc enzyme is found in organisms that are abundant in soil and can also be grown in large numbers to multiple devices at once. and that is Mycobacterium smear They are found in soil, water, and wastewater around the world, which is why they are so easy to grow and manipulate in a lab. The potential it has for generating electricity is fantastic and we’ll have to see how this research plays out in the future.

reference:

“Structural Basis for Bacterial Energy Extraction from Atmospheric Hydrogen” By Reese Grinter, Ashley Krupp, Harry Venugopal, Moritz Singer, Jack Baddeley, and Princess R. Matthew Belousoff, Hannah S. Savat, Gregory M Cook, Ralph B. Chittenhelm, Kylie A. Vincent, Seema Khaled, Gustav Berggren and Chris Groening, 8 March 2023, Nature. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-05781-7

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