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My adopted bacterium that I would like to share with everyone is Geobacter metallireducen. Underneath that Caulobacter-infested water, the mud buzzes with electricity. In the sediments, where oxygen is scarce, Geobacter is using electrical energy to breathe.
When living cells make energy, they make electrons, and these must be dumped somewhere. Us air-breathers use oxygen as to mop them up, but Geobacter dump their electrons on metals instead.
G. metallireducens is a rod shaped, Gram(-), anaerobic bacteria and have flagella and pili. It was the first organism found to oxidize organic compounds to CO2 with iron oxides as the electron acceptor. It plays a role in carbon and nutrient cycling and bioremediation, enabling the metabolism of soluble harmful contaminants into insoluble toxic forms. Genome has a chromosome length of 3,997,420 bp. It has a circular bacterial chromosome, there are no free ends of DNA. The shape is roughly like an egg.
Geobacter degrade the material by creating electrically conductive pili between itself and the pollutant material, using it as an electron source. Microbial biodegradation of recalcitrant organic pollutants is of great environmental significance and involves intriguing novel biochemical reactions.G. metallireducens has been known to take part in bioremediation of organic and metal contaminants in groundwater and participates in the carbon and nutrient cycles of aquatic sediments.
Electrogenic bacteria, such as Geobacter, can couple the oxidation of carbon sources to the reduction of extracellular electron acceptors; such acceptors include toxic and radioactive metals, as well as electrode surfaces, making Geobacter a suitable candidate for applied use in biorem …
The gram-negative metal-reducing microorganism, previously known as strain GS-15, was further characterized. This strict anaerobe oxidizes several short-chain fatty acids, alcohols, and monoaromatic compounds with Fe(III) as the sole electron acceptor. Furthermore, acetate is also oxidized with the …
Tracey Allen K. Freitas, ... Maqsudul Alam, in The Smallest Biomolecules: Diatomics and their Interactions with Heme Proteins, 2008
Author Summary The ability of microorganisms to exchange electrons directly with their environment has large implications for our knowledge of industrial and environmental processes. For decades, it has been known that microbes can use electrodes as electron acceptors in microbial fuel cell settings. Geobacter metallireducens has been one of the model organisms for characterizing microbe-electrode interactions as well as environmental processes such as bioremediation.
