Cable bacteria in the mud of the sea bottom
Mingdong Dong, Jie Song and Nils Risgaard-Petersen Bacteria living in sediments at the bottom of Aarhus Bay in Denmark can exchange electrons with other bacteria as far as 1 centimeter away—the equivalent of 12 miles if the bacteria were the size of people, Wired Science reported. The electrical signals are passed through long strands of the bacteria—a new species of the genus Desulfobulbaceae—that serve as transport cables for the community.
“To move electrons over these enormous distances in an entirely biological system would have been thought impossible,” co-author Moh El-Naggar, assistant professor of physics at the University of Southern California , said in a press release. But the bacteria seem built for the job. Cells line up end-to-end to form a single long filament. The outer surface of the cells are ribbed, and the researchers suspect these channels are what actually carry the electrons. Surrounding the channels is a membrane that may have insulating properites, like myelin sheaths of neurons.
The study, published yesterday (October 24) in Nature, adds to a growing body of literature on bacteria using electricity to communicate and survive. Earlier this year, Japanese researchers found that different species of microbes utilize ...
