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

Accelerating climate change is a major and serious threat to life on Earth. Rising temperatures are caused by microorganisms that produce 50% of atmospheric methane, which is 30 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.₂ trap heat. These high temperatures also accelerate microbial growth, produce more greenhouse gases than plants can utilize, and weaken the Earth’s ability to act as a carbon sink, further increasing global temperatures.

A potential solution to this vicious cycle could be another type of microbe that eats up to 80% of the methane flux from the marine sediments that protect our planet. However, they are difficult to study in the laboratory.of natural microbiology, a Yale University team led by Professor Nikhil Malvankar and a former Ph.D. Yangqi Gu, his Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry student at the Microbial Sciences Institute, has discovered the surprising wire-like properties of proteins made by Geobacter that generate electricity. This property is similar to methane-eating microbes.

The Malvankar lab previously reported that this protein wire highest conductivity known to date. It enables bacteria to generate the highest power ever reported, how these bacteria survive without membrane-uptakeable molecules like oxygen, and how electrons are more than 100 times the size of the bacteria. Describes how to form a community that can send However, to this day, no one has discovered how they are made or why they are conductive.

Using high resolution cryoelectron microscopy, the researchers looked at the atomic structure of the nanowires and found that the heme was densely packed to move electrons very fast with very high stability. The team also artificially constructed nanowires to illustrate how bacteria make them on demand.

“We could use these wires to generate electricity, or understand how methane-eating microbes use them to fight. climate changesaid Malbunker.

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