MIT Researchers Harness Viruses To Split Water

ByronScott writes "A team of researchers at MIT has just announced that they have successfully modified a virus to split apart molecules of water, paving the way for an efficient and non-energy-intensive method of producing hydrogen fuel. 'The team, led by Angela Belcher, the Germeshausen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Biological Engineering, engineered a common, harmless bacterial virus called M13 so that it would attract and bind with molecules of a catalyst (the team used iridium oxide) and a biological pigment (zinc porphyrins). The viruses became wire-like devices that could very efficiently split the oxygen from water molecules. Over time, however, the virus-wires would clump together and lose their effectiveness, so the researchers added an extra step: encapsulating them in a microgel matrix, so they maintained their uniform arrangement and kept their stability and efficiency.'"

Re:Hopefully they aren't too effective..

[Anonymous Coward]

kinda like ice-nine, but backwards?

Is this basic, applied or vaporware research?

[GAATTC]

Press release stories like this should get a special Slashdot category - something like scientific vaporware. While this is potentially an important discovery, none of the information needed to determine if this could ever be an energetically or economically viable way of producing hydrogen is provided. I split water into hydrogen and oxygen every day when I run gels in my lab. The energy you could potentially get from the hydrogen that this electrolysis produces is smaller than the amount of energy it takes to run the gel. Basic research is cool and all (so cool it's what I do for a living), but without more data I would guess that this discovery is very much on the basic end of the basic-->applied research spectrum. Discoveries like this are made all the time - only a tiny fraction end up being useful in real life.

Desalination

[SoTerrified]

Am I missing something, or wouldn't this be a huge benefit to the existing process of extracting drinkable water from sea water? One of the major problems with the current process is the energy costs. If this is a low energy way to separate the hydrogen and oxygen, it would be easy to filter and much less energy intensive to recombine.

Re:Hopefully they aren't too effective..

[mutube]

...they have no DNA

All viruses have either RNA or DNA. If it doesn't have DNA/RNA it's not a virus [wikipedia.org] (2nd para).

Viruses cannot replicate without a host cell. However, it's quite possible to create viruses that are replication defective and cannot replicate even given their natural host. This is not a 'mutation' that can be undone but the removal of the entire sections of the viral genome: the virus remains able to infect (capsid interactions) but cannot complete it's life cycle. Initial replication is done with specifically spliced crossovers in a susceptible host cell.

It's all quite safe, and forms the basis of using viruses for both vaccination and gene therapy.

Now that's over with:

WHAAAAAAAAAAA! PANIC! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!

Re:Hopefully they aren't too effective..

[Lueseiseki]

about 250 million years ago

And how many millions of years did it take to get back to normal? Do you think humans could continue to thrive for just one of those millions?

Re:Hopefully they aren't too effective..

[Moryath]

Homo Sapiens will either evolve into something (or several somethings) else, or die off entirely. Of course, we can argue that we've already managed to fuck up our own evolution pretty good; the number of our members who manage to breed despite incredibly crippling congenital diseases, tendency towards debilitating developmental diseases, or simply managing to survive their own ridiculous stupidity [southparkstudios.com] through advancing medical science, is staggering.

Re:Hopefully they aren't too effective..

[graft]

Uh, so what? World War II enabled me, too. Without it, Indian independence probably would have been delayed, my grandparents may not have met and I would not have been born. Should I thus celebrate Hitler's invasion of Poland? What an odd line of reasoning.