Genetically-Engineered Microbe No Longer Needs to Eat Food To Grow (sciencemag.org) 78
"Synthetic biologists have performed a biochemical switcheroo," reports Science magazine:
They've re-engineered a bacterium that normally eats a diet of simple sugars into one that builds its cells by absorbing carbon dioxide (CO2), much like plants. The work could lead to engineered microbes that suck CO2 out of the air and turn it into medicines and other high-value compounds.
"The implications of this are profound," says Dave Savage, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved with the work. Such advances, he says, could "ultimately make us change the way we teach biochemistry...."
In all, the evolved bacteria picked up 11 new genetic mutations that allowed them to survive without eating other organisms, the team reports today in Cell. "It really shows how amazing evolution can be, in that it can change something so fundamental as cellular metabolism," Milo says.
"The bacteria were given just enough sugar so they wouldn't starve to death," explains long-time Slashdot reader Tangential, "but had access to plenty of CO2 and formate.
"The process of evolution says that life finds a way to cope with stressful conditions like these, and some of the bacteria soon turned to the CO2 as a food source."
"The implications of this are profound," says Dave Savage, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved with the work. Such advances, he says, could "ultimately make us change the way we teach biochemistry...."
In all, the evolved bacteria picked up 11 new genetic mutations that allowed them to survive without eating other organisms, the team reports today in Cell. "It really shows how amazing evolution can be, in that it can change something so fundamental as cellular metabolism," Milo says.
"The bacteria were given just enough sugar so they wouldn't starve to death," explains long-time Slashdot reader Tangential, "but had access to plenty of CO2 and formate.
"The process of evolution says that life finds a way to cope with stressful conditions like these, and some of the bacteria soon turned to the CO2 as a food source."
I no longer know what's real (Score:2)
"The bacteria were given just enough sugar so they wouldn't starve to death,"
That's amazing! I just realized I don't need food to grow either! (I just need enough to not starve to death, no big deal)
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But if I remember the geomicrobiology lectures I attended for fun some years ago, those simple microorganisms are very flexible when it comes to what they can metabolize More complex organisms like animals, plants, or fungi are not because of all the inter-dependencies of their different cells.
The Food is Formate (Score:5, Informative)
Bad title. The e. Coli were made into autotrophs, which includes in its definition organisms that derive energy from simple compounds, but make everything else themselves - similar to chemosynthetic bacteria but using one of the simplest carbon compounds - formic acid (HCOOH) and its salts. But they do eat food, the aforementioned formate, to get energy.
This is the only energy source they use (what we usually are thinking about when we say "food") and it makes everything else from CO2 as the carbon source, some of which came from oxidizing formate into CO2 and H2O.
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Plants 'eat' CO2 as well and have existed for many millions of year. And they haven't eaten all of it.
Are you trying to act stupid as a from of humor? (Score:3)
Yeah, that is the point. It is a *balance*. Like any surviving process in nature. (Which is why we humans, who call that ideal state "stagnation", are an explosive pathogen that can not survive indefinitely.)
This microbe would tip that balance. And with no enemies, quickly out-compete plants for the produced CO2. Resulting in what OP said.
Sorry, you seem to be not very good at recognizing you are not very good at this, and hence believe you are.
Re:Are you trying to act stupid as a from of humor (Score:5, Informative)
In this case the microbes do this by making use of the energy in formate that the researches provided it with along with the CO2. The comment #59471700 (at the top of this thread) even pointed out that this is a derivative of formic acid. And formic acid isn't just found anywhere in nature.
Hence you are worrying about nothing essentially.
Which carbon molecules are lower energy? (Score:3)
Funny, I was thinking about this question earlier today, before your comment. It sounds like you might know the answer:
> CO2 is a rather low energy state molecule. If an organism is going to utilize an element from that chemical bond it's going to require energy to break that CO2 molecule apart
It's my understanding that carbon and oxygen tend to bond into CO2. CO2 won't react with too many other things to form something else, without energy input. Correct?
I know that aluminum and oxygen are similar -
Re:Which carbon molecules are lower energy? (Score:5, Informative)
And in physics the general idea is that the resulting molecules must be in a lower energy state than before for such a reaction to happen without energy input. The chemists call this 'exothermic'.
Now I can't tell you the energy levels of CO2 vs Al3O2 or whether CO2 + 3 Al -> AL3O2 + C is either +E or -E without looking it up myself.
Naively I would assume that pulling the one carbon from the two oxygens apart is no simple feat, since evolution has not utilized this mechanism where there's no high energy sources around to drive that reaction. But evolution isn't perfect, so this is not a correct assumption.
So I've looked around a bit and found an older book on bond dissociation energies, which is looking at the issue from a different perspective (the energy required to break the bonds): https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistp... [nist.gov]
Page 23 states that CO2 -> CO + O requires 532.2kJ/mol while CO -> C + O requires 1076.4kJ/mol. That would be 1608.6kJ/mol in total to split CO2 first into C + O + O. On page 11 there is AlO -> Al + O that requires 485kJ/mol. This tells me that at least the bond between the Al + O (not sure about Al3O2) is weaker than even the bonds in CO2.
Unfortunately there's no energy listed for a FeO bond so I had to find this
It states that the energy of FeO is 409kJ/mol and also confirms the number for the C-O bond.
Given this it makes sense to me that you can reduce FeO + Al -> Fe + AlO since the energy bond in FeO is weaker. CO2 or more specifically CO however is holding together pretty well.
And while I was looking up the energy levels of those molecules I found papers like this one https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
Though I can't say through what length you have to go to prepare such a catalyst like they used.
Thanks much! (Score:5, Informative)
I really appreciate it.
TLDR of the linked article - efficient catalytic conversion of CO2 appears to be an area of active research, research which shows some hope, but it's not easy.
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Turns out /. isn't dead after all.
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Very informative, thanks for writing this up.
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Since compounds are formed because elements want to bind together (they go down in potential energy, akin to moving downhill), the Gibbs free energy of most compounds [wikipedia.org] is negative. CO2 and H2O are near the bottom. (You have to divide the energy by the number of atoms to get potential energy per atom, since chemical reactions can take va
I knew there was a search term that I didn't know (Score:2)
> The measure you're looking for is Gibbs free energy
Thanks. I was pretty sure there was a term for it I could Google, but I didn't know the term. :)
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Seems like you didn't read the entire article. The idea is to use solar/wind/nuclear to power formate production (dissolve lots of CO2 in water, then apply electrical current). Then you feed formate to the bacteria, who use it and atmospheric CO2 for cell growth and/or production of boutique compounds. There's a net loss of atmospheric carbon here since some of it's going into cell growth and some of it's going into biosynthesis of desired product.
Some of this product might wind up going back into the at
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Wrong! Formic acid is found in, at least, ant colonies. Well, many of them. Apparently also in some nettles.
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I suspect there's a terminology problem here. "Food" is typically used to describe a mix of resources that provide materials and energy. In the case of CO2, clearly that's only materials. Just like how plants absorb CO2 to get the Carbon to construct sugars with. (and release most of the oxygen in the process)
I think it's obvious to most that the CO2 isn't a source of energy
(an interesting segway here, the O2 the plants release is higher in energy than the CO2 they absorbed. But they re-absorb some of t
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That is true for the O2 that the plants release as well as the sugars, fats, and protein they create. Even though I understand the concept behind it, I still think it's a fascinating process every time I think about it.
Yes, it's a bad choice of words.
The microbes certainly need more than even CO2 and formate. They will also require ATP - the 'molecular unit of currency' in livin
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The plants aren't consuming sufficient quantities of the produced CO2 even now, so what problem are you identifying, exactly?
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The microbe needs formate however, for the energy to break the bonds of CO2. This microbe isn't tipping any balances and can be controlled merely by controlling the amount of formate.
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The microbe needs formate however, for the energy to break the bonds of CO2. This microbe isn't tipping any balances and can be controlled merely by controlling the amount of formate.
This whole thread reminds me of episode 75 of The Twilight Zone : The Midnight Sun
Basically there are scientist that have discovered that the Earths orbit has be "perturbed" and is slowly slipping towards the sun. Temperatures are rising and people are dying/panicking. The twist comes at the very end when it is revealed that the entire episode was a dream (ala Total Recall style). The Earth orbit has actually been "perturbed" to a trajectory moving away from the sun and is turning into a ball of ice.
Point
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Mutations can't violate the laws of physics. If the bacteria mutate to the point that they no longer require formate, then what will be their substitute? We already have bacteria that can process sunlight and CO2 to grow - they're called cyanobacteria. They may have even caused a catastrophic event ending most life on Earth:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re-inventing cyanobacteria won't exactly a disaster this time around.
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If formic acid isn't around at large scale and if they need that that sounds like something which could limit it.
But yeah otherwise I too would had felt one could had created a competitor to plants.
If god is necessary to create it then we shouldn't have to worry?
Science to the rescue! (Score:1)
The rising carbon levels in our atmosphere have people really worried about future temperature levels, to the point of imposing restrictive laws that have real consequences for the economy (and for people's ability to earn a living).
Solving this problem through legal and cultural engineering has proven to be difficult, expensive, and ineffective.
Efforts to just plant more trees are underway, but we all know that the kinds of numbers we are talking about are staggering.
So, here we go. The scientists have ju
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Your theory that a "crazy" number of nuclear plants built now will solve anything is wrong. Adding all known and projected sources gives about 80 years of *known* and a total of 230 years of *projected* viable uranium reserves. https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
Uranium makes up about 10% of all electricity generation. If we boost that to 100% right away, you've got 8 years worth of proven reserves of uranium, since you won't have time to prospect for the rest. And that's not even accounting for uranium energ
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If the supply of U declines to the extent that the price increases by a factor of 10 (which happened in the petroleum market in recent times), it will become feasible to extract uranium from seawater. You're then takling about a billion years worth. If coastal cities start desalinating in a big way, metals like uranium will eventually be a byproduct of having to handle large quantities of seawater.
Let's be specific (Score:1)
"It really shows how amazing evolution can be, in that it can change something so fundamental as cellular metabolism," Milo says.
That is, directed evolution. In other words, design.
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All evolution is directed by its environment.
Well, no. Not even in the TFA case. That was directed by design, of the engineers. Why do you presume that fact applies only to the recent few decades? Your model is factually directly false, per immediate direct evidence, and even more falsely could apply as a universal to all history.
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Yah, and then we would leave the 1940s, (Score:2)
when we didn't know more about the nutrients we need than "it needs to be nutritious (=have energy)".
We need a large amount very specific molecules, in very specific secondary and teritary structuresy with very specific environments, to survive and stay healthy.
Lack a vitamin, mineral, trace element, or essential protein? Get sick and die. (Dairy-like?) protein folding partially ruined? Hello auto-immune diseases. Carbs don't branch enough and short? Wrong microbes grow and make you fat. Soo many factors. S
What is soda? (Score:2)
> Im sure we would be great at sucking up co2. Then we don't have to soak up all that diet coke
Suck up CO2 instead of soda? :)
What, exactly, is soda?
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But (Score:1)
And then for some reason, we all died. (Score:2)
CO2 is bad, right? I can't see what could go wrong if we got rid of all of it.
*spills beaker*
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No, because, once it escape the lab, this will be result [lazonasucia.com]. Be afraid...
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Yes, when we accidentally spill giga-tons of formate at the same time. Like anything else, this is limited by its food (energy) supply. CO2 isn't the food, formate is.
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Can you not take everything so literally? It's like you only think in black and white.
See what I did there?
Can you take you head out of the sand? (Score:2)
Yes, extremes are indeed usuall unlikely. But it is useful to highlight them, because 1. they are also the worst cases, and 2. it lets us prepare for all the less bad cases in the process.
This is why people do that.
People like you, on the other hand, are massively overwhelmed with preparing their minds for such extremes, and the only thing they can do, is stick their heads in the sand, and call everyone crazy or a conspiracy theorist disturbs their protective delusion of comforting calmness and safety.
Crazy
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For example if your chance is one in a million and you do it a million times the math for it happening 'at least once' looks like this:
1 - (1 - (1/1,000,000)) ^1,000,000 = 0.632
This is also why most people who understand probability theory know that the lottery is essentially a tax on those who don't understand probability theory.
Anyway, a much bigger part is how much resources one has to expend on preparing for such an unlikely event. In the case of pl
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Neal Stephenson's novel Zodiac features an engineered bacteria which turns environmental PCBs into salt. Which is fine, until some bright spark turns the process around. They create a bacteria which can turn salt into PCBs, thus short cutting an expensive manufacturing process.
Then that bacteria escapes into the ocean...
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Another quick step to becoming barren like mars...
Oh boy ... what could possibly go wrong. (Score:2)
It will be funny once that bacteria thrives in the wild, suffocating all the plants that need CO2.
Reminds me of when algae and trees (I think) ruined the athmosphere by introducing that nasty corrosive gas that turns everyting into fire, called "oxygen".
Can you say "holocene extinction event, alternate timeline edition"?
Oh well ... the planet will survive, and if we off ourselves that way, at least we would have done something good for the planet, for once.
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But it needs formate for energy however. formate isn't just lying around. Plants have sunlight, which is abundant.
This could be bad! (Score:2)
If this microbe gets out of hand it could possibly suck ALL of the CO2 out of the air. Since normal plants need CO2 to live all plants would die then all other creatures would die and then the microbes themselves. CO2 is a very necessary gas.
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... People who didn't understand the summary. This thing eats formate, which gives it enough free energy to break down the CO2. Nothing just eats CO2.
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The point here is that formate needs less energy to make than sugar, which is what else this e coli normally needs to live. So we can produce formate then breed these things as a cheaper way to absorb CO2 and make usable compounds.
engineered (Score:2)
They didn't engineer it. They poked it with a pointed stick until it engineered itself.
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maybe you only read the headline and not the summary? i.e. what this actually eats.
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My worry about 'combating' climage change goes something like this.
We certainly don't completely understand it, how would we know our 'corrections' aren't going to cause more harm?
If our track record with invasive species is any indication then we are quite likely on a bad road here.
Lets not do anything too hasty.
Paging Dr. Jeremy Stone (Score:2)
There's a fire, sir.
Seriously? (Score:2)
How do they make DNA without phosphorus?
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You could ask the same question about the original microbes: if they just live on "simple sugars" then how do they get phosphorus? The answer is "osmosis" is how they get everything, but when we say they "eat" sugars it we don't mean munching on it, we mean that it's stuff already absorbed by the cell membrane then metabolized by enzymes. It's the enzymes actually doing the "eating" not the cell itself.
To understand what they actually did, they took real-life microbes that mainly eat sugars, and they used s
Re: Seriously? (Score:2)
So in other words it needs things besides CO2 if it is to replicate/thrive.
Just enough sugar (Score:2)
eat CO2 and produce medicines
eat CO2 and produce gasoline
eat CO2 and produce chocolate
eat CO2 and produce super germs.
starve those trees (Score:1)
What Could Go Wrong? (Score:2)
Venus? (Score:2)
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I wonder if it would be possible to populate Venus with similar bugs? In particular, it would be useful if they could convert the CO2 to something that could be sent to the moon/mars. We will need carbon there (soil if nothing else), and plenty of it in its atmosphere.
Well that all depends on how much formate there is just waiting around on Venus for them...
"The bacteria were given just enough sugar so they wouldn't starve to death," explains long-time Slashdot reader Tangential, "but had access to plenty of CO2 and formate.
And weather you can add in the genes to make tiny little rocket engines for them to launch themselves out of Venus's gravity and then on to our moon or Mars.
You'd best get straight on it.
Caffeinated Bacon proving that he is a stupid trol (Score:2)
Bla bla bla (Score:2)
I've lost count of how many times I've pointed out your lies.
You are still yet to show even a single one of mine. That number is easy to remember, zero. Let me know when it changes.
Don't let your hunt for lies slow down your floating Venus CO2 collecting 'lets carbon the moon' project. You have much work to do.
I await further updates to your progress.
Re: Bla bla bla (Score:2)
WindBourne proving he never understands a thing (Score:2)
If you understood anything about Chemistry, let alone physics, or science, you would realize that what was the Formic Acid was used to provide the energy that sunlight used to.
OK Mr chemistry physics science genius. Where did you get the silly idea that they used sunlight and not sugar before the change?
On the energy side, the researchers couldn’t give the bacterium the ability to carry out photosynthesis, because the process is too complex. Instead, they inserted the gene for an enzyme that enabled the microbe to eat formate, one of the simplest carbon-containing compounds, and one other strains of E. coli can’t eat.
They aren't getting the energy from sunlight but from the formate you stable genius.
The actual research scientists couldn't get them to do it. But I'm sure you could knock something together in an afternoon. After you finished your floating Venus platform of course.
This is a really bad idea... (Score:1)
It's not smart to fool with Mother Nature (Score:1)
I read a story a couple of years ago about an attempt to eradicate a minor but annoying disease that was affecting crops in the U.K. The farmers and the government funded a study to find out how best to do that, in an attempt to find a natural alternative to chemical treatment. They eventually traced the source of the disease to small dust particles. The natural solution would be to take steps to minimize or eliminate the dust particles, right?
Except they also found that those same dust particles were in