Earlier this year, Lovley published a paper in Nature Nanotechnology performance that the pili on G. sulfurreducens are a type of 'nanowire', since they conduct electricity the pili help to power the bacterium by transferring electrons shaped during the cell's metabolism to external acceptors such as iron the fact that pili can as well reduce a metal such as uranium "provides further evidence for long-range electron transfer along the pili", he says.
The research should help to improve bioremediation the use of biological organisms to eliminate pollutants from soil and water such as clean-up of the a lot of sites contaminated by uranium processing during the cold war, "Current methods to arouse the growth of these bacteria in the environment are pretty crude and empirical," says Lovley, "This new mechanism resolve allow us to better predict how uranium can be depleted."
Reguera is most excited about the possibility of "getting away beginning the bugs" and making non-living devices based on nanowires, "This would let to work in sites where bacteria cannot live," she says, such as the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, which be devastated by a tsunami earlier this year.
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