Greg Egan on Nostr: Bacteria should have shared the 2025 chemistry Nobel Prize for metal-organic ...
Bacteria should have shared the 2025 chemistry Nobel Prize for metal-organic frameworks!
It’s been known for a while that there are “cable bacteria” that extrude conductive filaments up to 1 cm long, which penetrate sediments on the sea floor and allow them to draw electrons from buried sulphides to power their metabolism.
But it turns out the filaments made by Candidatus Electrothrix gigas are based on MOFs “strikingly similar to those used by chemists”. This was not a case of deliberate biomimicry; these MOFs were created in labs before they were discovered in nature.
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/bacteria-discovered-to-be-synthesising-metal-organic-frameworks-with-extraordinary-conductivity/4024399.article[You can register/subscribe at the Chemistry World site if you wish, but if you just close the box they still let you read this article.]
Published at
2026-10-28 11:00:04 UTCEvent JSON
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