I

n 1977 Engelbert Broda, a physical chemist,

then at the University of Vienna in Austria,
made a startling prediction
1
. Nitrate and
ammonia can and will react together in the
way that oxygen and organic carbon molecules
do. And so, in theory, it would be possible for a
creature to make a living by breathing nitrate
and eating ammonia, just as we do by breathing
oxygen and eating proteins, carbohydrates or
fats. The creatures Broda had in mind for this
bizarre diet were not some race of aliens float-
ing in a soup of ammonia under red, nitrate-
laden skies, but earthly bacteria of a sort never
before imagined.
The discovery of bacteria capable of this
anaerobic ammonia oxidation or anammox
reaction, in the late 1990s
2
, was a high-water
mark for the rising tide of what might be called
microbial triumphalism. The anammox reac-
tion, it transpires, is a dazzlingly hard trick to
pull off it produces hydrazine (rocket fuel)
as an intermediate, which the bacteria have to
tuck away in internal sacs made of lipids.
If bacteria have found a way to take advan-
tage of nitrates propensity to oxidize ammonia,
despite having to cope with a toxic by-product,
is there anything they cannot do? Subsequent
discoveries of bacteria that breathe metal
oxides, or feed on bleach have strengthened
the case for bacterial omnipotence. Last month,
one of the last gaps in the bacterial skill set was
closed when some of them (in concert with
helpful members of another class of single-
celled organism, the archaea) were discovered
using nitrates to get energy from methane
3
.
And yet there are still some energy-pro-
ducing pathways down which no bacteria
have been seen to stroll. No known bacteria
seem to live by oxidizing manganese; none
derive their energy from molecular nitrogen;
and no photosynthetic bacterium is known
that uses ammonia, phosphine (phosphorus
hydride), or even methane, although the laws
of thermodyamics show that all those reac-
tions could provide energy. Are such organ-
isms really absent, or have we just not found
them yet? And if they are absent, does this
reflect a fundamental limitation on lifes in
genuity? Or does it reveal set truths about the
Earths environmental chemistry?
I can imagine that evolutions random walk
has failed to locate some reactions, argues
Franklin Harold, an emeritus professor of bio-
chemistry and molecular biology at Colorado
State University in Fort Collins. If no bacteria
live by molybdenum reduction, no profound
principle is indicated. But there is some rea-
son to believe that the missing tricks could
explain why bacteria specialize so narrowly,
forming rich metabolic networks and ecosys-
tems only through collaboration. Indeed, bac-
terias inabilities may be fundamental to the
question of why there are ecosystems at all,
rather than one all-conquering bug.
Working in pairs
Its a dangerous game to put up your hand and
say bacteria cant do this or that, as we proba-
bly only know about 1 to 5% of bacteria on the
planet says microbiologist Ken Nealson, at
the University of Southern California, Los
Angeles. But Id wager that there are con-
straints on whats possible, beyond whether a
reaction yields energy; some of these are still
an incredible, wonderful mystery.
The common factor in all the forms of res-
piration known is the involvement of what
chemists call a redox pair an electron donor
and an electron receptor. The process by which
electrons are stripped from the donor is called
oxidation, because oxygen is the most familiar
stripper of electrons (and also a very powerful
one). The electrons are transferred to an
acceptor, which is said to be reduced; hence
the term redox. Non-chemical ways of gener-
ating energy are conceivable (see The first
electrochemist) but dont seem to be used.
Lifes dependence on redox reactions led the
great geneticist Hermann Muller to describe it
as a fancy form of rust. But it is rust with a
purpose. As the electrons go from willing
donor to willing acceptor, they go down a ther-
modynamic gradient; this means they lose
energy. In respiring cells, the energy from this
flow of electrons is used to build up a gradient
of protons across membranes. When the pro-
tons flow down this artificially created gradi-
ent back across the membrane, ATP is created
NEWS FEATURE NATURE|Vol 441|18 May 2006
274
BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED
Among their many talents, bacteria are the worlds best electrochemists, creating a life-powering
flow of electrons in a startling range of conditions. In the first of two features, Nick Lane asks what
limits, if any, constrain this ability. In the second, Charlotte Schubert meets the people trying to
put this microbial ingenuity to practical use.
What cant bacteria do?
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a molecule that stores energy in a form that
can be given up wherever it is needed to drive
the cells molecular machinery. (Humans may
prefer to use these electrons for other pur-
poses; see page 277.)
In the case of aerobic respiration, used by
most animals and many bacteria, the electron
acceptor is oxygen, but it can be anything that
has a hunger for electrons: carbon dioxide,
nitrate, perchlorate (used in bleaches) or plain
protons will do. All that matters is that the recip-
ients redox potential its tendency to acquire
electrons is higher than that of the donor.
The greater the difference in potentials, the
more energy is released (see graphic, overleaf).
In photosynthesis, the energy of the Sun is
used to tear electrons from unwilling donors,
driving redox reactions thermodynamically
uphill. The absorption of energy by a chloro-
phyll molecule turns it into a fierce oxidant.
Like a dentist pulling teeth it then wrenches
electrons from a bystander that would nor-
mally be loath to surrender them. The elec-
trons are ultimately transferred to carbon
dioxide (the electron acceptor) to form sugars.
Whether the electrons come from willing
donors, as in respiration, or unwilling ones, as
in photosynthesis, the bacteria need a way to
get rid of the reduced molecules where the
electrons accumulate once the reactions have
run their course. In anaerobic systems, the
reduced molecule in question will often be
hydrogen. Unless the hydrogen is removed,
the whole ecosystem gums up; thats why
hydrogen consumers such as methanogens
[archaea that produce methane] are so impor-
tant, says Nealson. Other organisms in the
ecosystem benefit: By removing hydrogen,
shifting the equilibrium, they make other
processes thermodynamically possible, such
as using protons as electron acceptors, which
generates more hydrogen.
Current thinking
A build up of end products is not the only
obstacle. The need for specially lined rocket-
fuel tanks that the anammox reaction forces
on bacteria highlights the fact that intermedi-
ates can also be a problem. So do recent find-
ings about bacteria that oxidize perchlorate,
notes Stuart Ferguson, a biochemist of the
University of Oxford, UK.
So far, six bacterial species are known to use
perchlorate as an electron acceptor
4
. At first,
the key component was thought to be an
enzyme shared by these species that normally
passes electrons to nitrate or nitrite, and which
serendipitously happens to be able to deal with
perchlorate too (the receptor molecules are
not dissimilar in size and shape). But more
recent work has shown that the crucial com-
mon denominator is in fact an enzyme that
can detoxify the most toxic intermediate, chlo-
rite
5
. Bacteria with the enzyme chlorite dis
mutase can cope; those lacking it could not.
Being able to cope with toxicity, not the ability
to carry out the appropriate redox chemistry,
is the bottleneck.
Is this a general truth? Toxicity can be a big
challenge for microbes, says geochemist
Donald Canfield of the University of Southern
Denmark. Canfield thinks that there may be
molecules that are too toxic for bacteria to deal
with. I dont know of any microbes that can
oxidize phosphine, for example. Perhaps its
just too toxic it ignites spontaneously in
air. This is despite there being environments
such as swamps and rice paddies where phos-
phine is plentiful. From a thermodynamic
point of view it would make good sense,
argues Canfield. In oxygen-free settings, phos-
phines spontaneously combustible nature
might be less of a problem. If there are phos-
phine-eaters, the most likely place for them to
turn up would be in anaerobic sediments such
as those of Lake Taihu in China a site of
ongoing research into the phosphate cycle.
Another factor that might stump bacteria is
kinetics the speed at which a reaction takes
place naturally. For example, a potential source
of energy in many marine sediments is the
reaction of iron oxides such as rust with
hydrogen sulphide that can bubble up from
below. But this reaction happens so fast natu-
rally that, apparently, no bacteria can tap into
it for energy, says Canfield. They would have
to come up with an enzyme that could actually
slow it down.
On the other hand, some thermodynami-
cally favourable reactions are hard to get
started, and go slowly. Enzymes are good at
speeding up such reactions through catalysis,
but the degradation of certain compounds
needs a huge pulse of energy to get going. For
such compounds, with a very high activation
energy, the reaction is too slow to be prof-
itable for microbes despite their enzymatic
cleverness.
A good rule of thumb is to look for what
To make a certain reaction
work, a bacterium has to
occupy a particular niche.
Robert Blankenship
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accumulates, says biochemist Rolf
Thauer, at the Max Planck Institute for
Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg,
Germany. Lignin is a good example.
When lignin, a key component of hard
wood, first evolved around 375 million
years ago, nothing could metabolize it;
the great reserves of coal in the Car-
boniferous period attest to that failure.
Even today, it remains a challenge, and
one that is met for the most part by aer-
obic fungi, says Thauer. The molecule
is too large for most bacteria to handle,
and its activation energy is too high.
Conversely, a lack of build up can be
evidence of microbial activity. Geo-
chemists knew that methane was miss-
ing from ocean sediments long before
the anaerobic bacteria and archaea
(another group of microbes) that oxi-
dize it were discovered. It should have
been accumulating, but wasnt, so
something had to be oxidizing it.
Microbiologists said thats not poss
ible, recalls Thauer, but clearly it was
going somewhere. Benzene is a similar
case. Its disappearance from anaerobic
environments means something must
be consuming it. But the organisms and
metabolic pathways involved have yet
to be elucidated.
Accumulating evidence
Perhaps the most interesting accumula-
tion is of the molecule currently filling
80% of your lungs. Atmospheric nitro-
gen is mostly made by bacteria that
reduce nitrates. Reducing the nitrogen
further, to make ammonia, could in
principle be a way of getting energy out
of various organic fuels; but this doesnt
seem practical. Bacteria do reduce
nitrogen, says Friedrich Widdel, at the
Max Planck Institute for Marine Micro-
biology in Bremen, Germany. But none can
glean energy from this process: the activation
energy needed to break the triple bond of
nitrogen is too high.
Widdel points out that the opposite process,
using nitrogen as an electron donor and thus
forming nitrate, is also possible. He thinks
that ecological constraints may be blocking
the use of this reaction by bacteria. Perhaps
the problem is the high energy hills on the
way to nitrate, he speculates. But photo
synthetic organisms should have unlimited
energy: they ought to be able to use nitrogen
as an electron donor.
Robert Blankenship, a biochemist at Ari-
zona State University in Tempe, agrees that
there are many potential forms of pho-
tosynthesis that bacteria dont seem to
use, and also suggests an ecological
explanation scarce resources.
Because sulphur compounds are used
as electron donors for photosynthesis,
you might predict that phosphorus and
nitrogen compounds would be used
too, but to the best of our knowledge
theyre not, he says. I suspect theyre
too important for other purposes
theyre in short supply, and limit
growth because theyre needed for
proteins and nucleotides.
Creatures of habit
If there were no other electron donor
available, this constraint might not be
so strong. But there almost always is.
Cyanobacteria, algae and plants benefit
from a type of photosynthesis that uses
water as its electron source; this process
can take place anywhere where there is
sunshine, water and carbon dioxide
(the electron acceptor).
Whats more, with this kind of
oxygen-generating photosynthesis, the
reduced compounds that might other-
wise be used as electron donors in
photosynthesis are mopped up: the
compounds react chemically with oxy-
gen in the surroundings, or properly
equipped bacteria burn them up in
respiration. Few reduced compounds
survive long where light is plentiful,
because of the oxygenating effects
of photosynthesis. This may well be
why ammonia-based photosynthesis,
another possible form of metabolism
that Broda discussed in the 1977 paper
1
,
has never been seen.
These constraints may hamper the
iron-oxidizing photosynthetic bacteria
first discovered by Widdel and his col-
leagues in the early 1990s
6
. The purple bacteria
use soluble ferrous iron as an electron donor
for photosynthesis, precipitating insoluble fer-
ric iron as rust. But they seem to be restricted to
sediments rather than open waters. Part of the
problem is that ferrous iron is rarely found high
in the water column, where it is quickly oxi-
dized; so iron-oxidizing bacteria thrive only in
Aerobic
respiration
Anaerobic
methane
oxidation
Anammox
reaction
Methano-
genesis
H
2
O O
2
H
2
H
+
CH
4
CO
2
Mn
2+
MnO
2
N
2
NH
4
+
H
2
S SO
4
2
NH
4
+
NO
3

N
2
NO
3
H
2
O O
2
CH
4
CO
2
Mn
2+
MnO
2
H
2
NH
4
+
H
2
S SO
4
2
NH
4
NO
3
+
N
2
NO
3

OXIDATION REDUCTION
Redox potential in volts
(tendency to acquire electrons)
CH
2
O CO
2
CH
2
O CO
2
H
2
H
+
0
+1
1 1
0
+1
MIX AND MATCH REACTIONS
Bacteria and archaea can tap into the energy made available when
electrons released from an oxidation reaction are used in an electron-
absorbing reduction that is lower down the energy scale. (The length of
the thick arrows indicates the amount of energy released.)
Bacteria may be the best
electrochemists going, but their
obsession with redox reactions
is a curiosity in itself. Why not
use heat or mechanical forces
for energy? Plenty of bacteria
live in hydrothermal conditions
life on Earth may even have
originated there. Yet none has
been found that can tap the
heat gradient of vents directly
perhaps by using a long
thin cellular structure to
stretch across the gradient
from cold to hot.
Or why not use water
currents? Bacteria often move
around by rotating rigid
corkscrew-like flagellae, using
tiny molecular motors powered
by redox chemistry. There is no
reason in principle not to fix the
cell to a base, use water
currents to rotate the flagellum
in reverse and capture the
mechanical force.
The dependence of all
microbes on electrochemistry
tells us something about early
life on Earth. At the very least, it
shows that the last ancestor of
all microbes must have been an
electrochemist. Either it was so
successful that it supplanted all
life using other forms of energy
in its first flush of youth, or else
the origin of life itself involved
redox chemistry. We may
never know which until we
see how life operates on other
planets, says microbiologist
Ken Nealson, at the University
of Southern California,
Los Angeles. N.L.
THE FIRST ELECTROCHEMIST
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The left-hand side of Peter Girguiss lab is a
mucky place. Dried mud flecks benches,
beakers and scales, and buckets of slime clutter
the floor. Fresh ooze is flown in regularly from
California. A skein of pipes fed by a 2,000-
gallon tank of sea water in the basement keeps
everything moist. On the floor, wires gush
out of dismembered plastic cocoons, and
electrodes poke out of various tanks.
The messy workplace is a design shop for
electrical generators. This summer, microbiol-
ogist Girguis and his colleagues at Harvard
University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will
shove graphite electrodes, like those used in this
lab, into the sea floor of Monterey Bay in
California. The current that flows between the
electrodes will power a suite of scientific instru-
ments, including a wave and tide meter, and a
fluorometer that measures levels of chlorophyll
in sea water.
Girguiss work depends on the fact that
when bacteria respire they pull electrons off
organic debris. Catch those electrons on an
electrode that is hooked up to a second elec-
trode in free
water, say, or in air, or
in another layer of sediment where the
microbes use a different sort of electrochem-
istry (see page 274) and the electrons will
flow from the first to the second electrode.
That gives you a current with which you can
power things.
The currents produced by these microbial
fuel cells are small, but their potential, in the
non-voltage sense, may be surprisingly large.
After all, microbes can produce electrons
from sediment, sewage, food scraps or pig
slop. Girguis, a self-confessed gearhead, takes
some delight in a simple demonstration of
their current-generating abilities using just a
bucket, some hardware-store supplies and a
bag of cow manure.
People have been trying to harness the power
of microbes in this way since the early 1900s,
although with little practical success. Engineer-
ing advances and molecular biologys new tools,
some of which have a home in the clean half of
Giguiss lab, have allowed him and like-minded
the sediments of shallow waters where mud
low in oxygen is exposed to sunlight.
The things bacteria dont do mostly seem
to be things the environment doesnt eas-
ily let them do. But although, as a
group, bacteria can make use of
more or less every reaction within
thermodynamic and ecological lim-
its, any given bacterium can proba-
bly only manage a few of them.
Given the apparent ease with which
bacteria and archaea swap genes, this
might seem surprising. Why dont photo-
synthetic sulphur bacteria, for example,
ever reduce sulphate in the dark? Why are
different bacteria needed to oxidize ammo-
nia to nitrate and then reduce the nitrate
back to nitrogen. In short, why is there not
one super-bacterium that does everything?
Thats a vexed question! says Blanken-
ship. Id say it was something to do with
redox reactions running one way under
some conditions, and another way if you
change the conditions. So to make a certain
reaction work, a bacterium has to occupy a
particular niche. If a specific range of
redox potentials are needed for some
processes to work, but others are not com-
patible with that, then the best solution is
to cooperate with your neighbour, adds
Blankenship. The ecosystem thus becomes
a way of dealing with the build up of waste
products, and getting as much energy as
possible out of the environment.
If Blankenship is right, the immense
subtlety with which bacteria are able to get
one thing done may be what stops them
from getting everything done. If they
werent constrained by their own fine tun-
ing of redox conditions, there wouldnt be
any diverse microbial systems.
And theres an obvious corollary. If you
really want to understand how bacteria and
archaea make their livings, you need to
study communities, not individuals,
whether they be tightly coupled partner-
ships such as those between archaea and
bacteria that oxidize methane or the looser,
more complex communities found wher-
ever the redox potential of a sediment
varies with depth. And that approach
requires, among other things, a new culture
of microbiology. As Nealson puts it: When
I was a student, you were thrown out for
working with mixed cultures, but today the
interest is in how bacterial consortia oper-
ate. If you fish out two bacteria in a cling,
theyre doing something together, but weve
hardly begun to look.
Nick Lane is a science writer based in London.
1. Broda, E. Z. Allg. Mikrobiol. 17, 491493 (1977).
2. M. Strous et al. Nature 400, 446449 (1999).
3. Raghoebarsing, A. A. et al. Nature440, 918921 (2006).
4. Coates, J. D. et al. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 65,
52345241 (1999).
5. Xu, J. & Logan, B. E. J. Microbiol. Meth. 54, 239247
(2003).
6. Widdel, F. et al. Nature 362, 834836 (1993).
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researchers to breathe life into the field.
This technology would transform the
world if it ever became reliable and could be
used on a large scale, says Bruce Rittman,
director of the Center for Environmental
Biotechnology at Arizona State Universitys
Biodesign Institute in Tempe. But he admits
that is still a dream. We are quite some dis-
tance from capturing the benefits at an eco-
nomic scale. To get there, he estimates that
researchers will need to produce fuel cells with
power-generating abilities that are a hundred
times greater than those of todays cells.
All of microbial fuel-cell research invariably
has to deal with the interface between
microbes and the electrodes, says Girguis.
One approach, favoured by engineers, is to try
to improve the cells design and the materials
from which the electrodes are made. Biolo-
gists, however, aspire to better understand the
microbes themselves, with the aim of inform-
ing more sophisticated designs or designing
better bacteria.
Natural lighting
Fuel-cell builders have been adding electron
mediators small molecules that help elec-
trons move around to their systems for
years to increase the current. But another way
to enhance performance may be to increase
the physical contact between the bacteria and
the electrodes.
Last year, Derek Lovley at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, revealed that mem-
bers of a group of bacteria called Geobacter
extrude protein spines, or pili, which conduct
electricity
2
. And they are not the only ones,
according to findings presented this February at
a conference sponsored by the US Department
of Energy, and held in Bethesda, Maryland.
Yuri Gorby from the Pacific Northwest
National Laboratory in Richland, Washington,
reported that nanowires sprout from a range of
bacteria, including the iron-breathing microbes
Shewanella and the photosynthetic bacteria
Synechocystis. Using Synechocystis, he and his
colleagues have made a solar-powered form of
microbial fuel cell. The key to the nanowires
conductivity, Gorby and his colleagues found,
was the presence of certain cytochromes
electron-shuttling molecules found in bacterial
membranes. Bacteria lacking the nanowires or
cytochromes are poor conductors of electricity.
Researchers are already thinking about how
to harness the findings. Gorbys colleague,
microbiologist Ken Nealson at the University
of Southern California in Los Angeles, points
out that Geobacter and Shewanella have
evolved to transfer electrons to scraps of metal
found in nature, not to an artificial electrode.
Encouraging them to evolve electrode com-
patibility might yield a great deal of improve-
ment. Nealson and Lovley say that
electrode-adapted bacteria could one day
produce fuel cells with at least 100-fold
greater power-generating abilities compared
with current cells.
Such improved bacteria might be too
specialized and delicate to thrive in marine
sediments. But they could be put to use in pur-
pose-built closed bioreactor systems, where
they could generate electricity by chewing up
biomass. Its the best approach we have to
developing an industrial application or pro-
ducing a lot of power, says Girguis.
While the biologists extol the potential of
nanowires, Bruce Logan, an environmental
engineer at the Pennsylvania State University
in University Park, prefers to concentrate on
the chemistry and physics of the fuel cells.
Logan says he hasnt seen much practical
advance from understanding the biology of the
microbes. Its not clear whether we are limited
by the bacteria or the physics of the system, he
says. And although he is not dismissive of the
microbiologists indeed he has just started
collaborating with Nealson he argues that
most of our improvements have been geared
towards the physics and chemistry, suggesting
that that is the major roadblock.
Energy on the cheap
Logan works with industrial runoff, animal
waste and sewage. At least 1.5% of US electric-
ity production goes into wastewater treatment,
he says. He wants to change that equation, by
developing systems that produce electricity as
well as cleaning the water.
The field of wastewater treatment by fuel cells
was opened up by Byung-Hong Kim, a micro-
biologist from the Korea Institute of Science
and Technology in Seoul; Kim developed a sys-
tem that didnt need added electron mediators
in the 1990s
3
. Since then engineers, such as
Logan, have worked on various ways of improv-
ing the design and the power output of these
cells. Logans most recent table-top device yields
the equivalent of 15.5 watts per cubic metre of
household waste water flowing through it
4
.
By the standards of a conventional fuel cell,
such as one powered by hydrogen, thats a very
poor yield. But with scale-up, Logan estimates
that the waste water from 100,000 people, or a
large industrial plant, could produce 0.8
megawatts, enough to power about 500
homes. Such a system would also scrub waste
water of troublesome compounds such as
ammonia, which is consumed by the
microbes, and produce 5090% less sludge
than conventional methods.
Unfortunately, the electron-gathering anodes
in Logans laboratory systems are made from
moderately expensive graphite or carbon
paper, and the cathodes need to be coated with
very costly platinum for the best effects. Willy
Verstraete, an environmental engineer at Ghent
University in Belgium, says that, extrapolating
The power of mud: soil bacteria free up electrons as they respire. When used to induce a current between electrodes, these can light up a lamp.
This technology would transform
the world if it ever became reliable
and could be used on a large scale.
Bruce Rittman
Multi-talented: microbes could help remove toxins
from waste water, and power the treatment plants.
P
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linearly from the costs of the prototypes, the
capital expenditure for a full-scale plant would
be five to ten times higher than it is for todays
treatment plants. So the hunt is on for cheaper
materials.
Logan points out that the technology does
not have to be cheap, just cheaper than the
current techniques. The United States already
spends about $25 billion each year on domes-
tic wastewater treatment, he says. He is work-
ing on a design of fuel cell that he says could be
cost effective and scalable; he hopes this will
yield ten times as much power per cubic metre
of waste water as current designs do.
Power to the people
Verstraete is more cautious. Industry is
expressing a lot of interest, he says, but they
are not putting the money on the table. He
says that companies want to see yields as high
as 1,000 watts per cubic metre and to see
them in prototypes a thousand times larger
than the milk-carton-sized devices now hon-
ing the technology. He sees a role for the
technology in cleaning certain nitrogenous
pollutants out of waste water, or chewing up
effluents from the digesters that convert bio-
mass to methane on some farms. But its still a
long road to the first microbial car (see And
what if it worked?).
Meanwhile, the powering of marine instru-
ments seems to be the application moving the
fastest. Girguiss work on Monterey Bay sedi-
ments follows the lead of pioneers such as
Lenny Tender at the US Naval Research Labo-
ratory in Washington DC. Tender was one of
the team that first successfully extracted cur-
rent from marine sediment more than five
years ago
5
. This summer, Tender plans to
launch a microbial fuel cell that powers an
acoustic device for measuring water velocity.
Taking measurements every 4 hours it will
consume an average of just 0.1 watts.
Environmental monitoring on the land and
the ocean surface is increasingly powered by
solar cells that can work for years unsuper-
vised. The ocean floors, being abysmally short
of sunlight, need a different approach, and
Tender, Girguis and their colleagues think that
microbial-powered electricity is the solution.
This would obviate the need for battery
replacement that currently drives up the costs
of such studies.
They have a lot more work to do before they
can call this a real proven technology, says
James Bellingham, chief technologist at the
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute,
who is working with Girguis. But these guys
have come very far very fast.
Which other niche areas might be success-
ful is less clear. For his terrestrial applications,
Girguis is collaborating with an architect who
specializes in new materials. Together, they
plan to design LED lighting systems that can
be powered by a bucket of food scraps or ani-
mal waste. He says such devices could be
mass-produced for about ten dollars each and
could help generate light for many of the 1.6
billion people living outside the worlds elec-
trical grid. Although such people are obvious
candidates for solar power, Giguis says the
microbial option has the advantage of being
much less expensive to manufacture and eas-
ier to operate and repair. And it can work in
the dark.
The technology need not always be cheap
and cheerful. Rittman has a grant of $100,000
from NASA to design a compact microbial
fuel cell that consumes human waste during a
manned astronaut mission. But like many
researchers in the area, he dreams of bigger
opportunities on Earth. If microbial fuel cells
could be adapted for the consumption of plant
biomass, they could in theory produce twice
the amount of electrical energy that combus-
tion-driven generators can, says Rittman.
Again, however, the best that has been done is
not quite that good, and is stuck on the lab
bench for now.
But Nealson, for one, is confident things can
improve, especially if links between different
disciplines housed in different departments
can be strengthened. Our job here is to
understand how the bacteria work, and once
we know that we can get together with the
engineers. Then you might find out how to
make the ideal fuel cell. He laughs, maybe it
will drive itself across campus.
Charlotte Schubert is senior News and Views
editor for Nature Medicine
1. Potter, M. C. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 84, 260276 (1911).
2. Reguera, G. et al. Nature 435, 10981101 (2005).
3. Kim, B.-H., Kim, H.-J., Hyun, M.-S. & Park, D.-H. J. Microbiol.
Biotechnol. 9, 127131 (1999).
4. Cheng, S., Liu, H. & Logan, B. E. Environ. Sci. Technol. 40,
24262432 (2006).
5. Reimers, C. E., Tender, L. M., Fertig, S. & Wang, W. Environ.
Sci. Technol. 35, 192195 (2001).
Ken Nealson thinks technologies using microbes could be improved by knowing about their biology.
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AND WHAT IF IT WORKED?
In his satirical novel Distraction, science-fiction author Bruce Sterling imagines the development of
a microbial power source for future cars and the industrys fear of the far-reaching changes it
heralds. Here, one of his characters rails against the hapless innovator:
You think its easy running
corporate R&D? It was just fine,
as long as the guy didnt have
anything. Jesus, nobody ever
thought a goddamn sugar engine would work.
The goddamn thing is just a germ in a box! We
build cars up here, we dont build giant germs!
Then they pull this crazy stunt and well it
makes our life impossible! Were a classic
metal bending industry! We have interlocking
directorates all throughout the structure, raw
materials, fuel, spare parts, the dealerships
We cant get into the face of our fuel suppliers,
telling them that were replacing them with
sugar water! We own our fuel suppliers! Itd be
like sawing off our own foot!
Batteries have the highest profit margin of
any automobile component. We were making
money there. You cant make real money
anywhere else in our business. The Koreans
are building auto bodies out of straw and
paper! We cant support an industry when
cars are cheaper than grocery carts! What are
we going to tell the unions? This is a great
American tradition at stake here! The car
defines America: the assembly line, suburbs,
drive-ins, hot rods, teenage sex, everything
that makes America great! We can't turn
ourselves inside out because some big-
brained creep has built an engine out of bug
guts! There wouldn't be
anything left of us! The
guy is a menace to society!
He had to be stopped.

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