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#An ultra-stable protein nanowire made by electric bacteria provides clues to combating climate change

“An ultra-stable protein nanowire made by electric bacteria provides clues to combating climate change”

An ultra-stable protein nanowire made by electric bacteria provides clues to combating climate change
“Nanowires” produced by Geobacter in response to an electric field applied to electricity-producing biofilms. These nanowires are composed of cytochrome OmcZ and show 1000-fold higher conductivity and 3-times higher stiffness than the nanowires of cytochrome OmcS important in natural environments, allowing bacteria to transport electrons over 100-times their size. Credit: Sibel Ebru Yalcin. Design: Ella Maru Studio

Accelerated climate change is a major and acute threat to life on Earth. Rising temperatures are caused by microbes producing 50% of atmospheric methane which is 30-times more potent than CO2 at trapping heat. These elevated temperatures are also accelerating microbial growth and thus producing more greenhouse gases than can be used by plants, thus weakening the earth’s ability to function as a carbon sink and further raising the global temperature.


A potential solution to this vicious circle could be another kind of microbes that eat up to 80% of methane flux from ocean sediments that protects earth. But they are difficult to study in the laboratory. In Nature Microbiology, Yale team, led by Prof. Nikhil Malvankar and former Ph.D. student Yangqi Gu, of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Microbial Sciences Institute, discover surprising wire-like properties of a protein made by electricity-producing Geobacter that show similarity those of methane-eating microbes.

Malvankar lab had previously shown that this protein wire shows the highest conductivity known to date. It allows bacteria to produce to highest electric power reported possible so far and explains how these bacteria can survive without oxygen-like membrane-ingestible molecules and form communities that can send electrons over 100-times bacterial size. But to date, no one had discovered how they are made and what why they so conductive.

Using high-resolution cryo-electron microscopy, the researchers were able to see the nanowire’s atomic structure and discover that hemes packed closely to move electrons extremely fast with ultra-high stability. The team also built nanowires synthetically to explain how bacteria make nanowires on demand.

“It is possible we could use these wires to generate electricity or understand how methane-eating microbes use them to combat climate change,” Malvankar said.

Other authors are Malvankar Lab Members Matthew Guberman-Pfeffer, Vishok Srikant, Cong Shen, Yuri Londer, Fadel Samatey with collaborators Victor Batista, Kallol Gupta and Fabian Giska.

More information:
Yangqi Gu, Structure of Geobacter cytochrome OmcZ identifies mechanism of nanowire assembly and conductivity, Nature Microbiology (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41564-022-01315-5. www.nature.com/articles/s41564-022-01315-5

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Yale University

Citation:
An ultra-stable protein nanowire made by electric bacteria provides clues to combating climate change (2023, February 2)
retrieved 2 February 2023
from https://phys.org/news/2023-02-ultra-stable-protein-nanowire-electric-bacteria.html

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