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Something similar to the Geobacter genus might be a good candidate, considering they can metabolise a wide range of organic compounds including hydrocarbons like oil and use iron oxide (something Mars has lots of) instead of oxygen. Not sure on the temperature ranges they can survive or their liquid water requirements but that's part of what this mission is about, to find out if there are micro-environments on Mars capable of supporting single celled organisms.

Some technical info and photos: http://www.geobacter.org/publications/19487117/

I've a question: it seems that nanowire and nanotube are the same objects. In that case, nothing so new. See http://www.geobacter.org/ and a paper in the June 23, 2005 issue of Nature about the geobacter bacteria. I did a funny use of it during the rump session of CRYPTO 2005 at UCSB, see http://www.iacr.org/conferences/crypto2005/rumpSchedule.html "The geobacter attack: when nanotechnology meets chips" with the slides and the video.

A lot of good microbial fuel cell work, including the discovery of the geobacter genus, has been done by D.R. Lovley and the group at UMass/Amherst.

In addition to their work on the microbial fuel cells themselves, they've also made the interesting discovery that the bacteria naturally form nanowires to transfer electrons outside the cell--something potentially [sorry!] useful to connect to an external electrode.

A lot of good microbial fuel cell work, including the discovery of the geobacter genus, has been done by D.R. Lovley and the group at UMass/Amherst.

In addition to their work on the microbial fuel cells themselves, they've also made the interesting discovery that the bacteria naturally form nanowires to transfer electrons outside the cell--something potentially [sorry!] useful to connect to an external electrode.

A lot of good microbial fuel cell work, including the discovery of the geobacter genus, has been done by D.R. Lovley and the group at UMass/Amherst.

In addition to their work on the microbial fuel cells themselves, they've also made the interesting discovery that the bacteria naturally form nanowires to transfer electrons outside the cell--something potentially [sorry!] useful to connect to an external electrode.

• PubMed's list of Derek Lovley's papers (pops).
• Geobacter Project Page at UMass (pops).
• The paper in question (pops -- warning, PDF).

• PubMed's list of Derek Lovley's papers (pops).
• Geobacter Project Page at UMass (pops).
• The paper in question (pops -- warning, PDF).

Actually, geobacter is more interesting for its ability to decontaminate soil.

GeoBacter

Interesting stuff.

You mean Bioremediation? There's already gobs of research being done in this area. :)

The geobacter project does exactly that for Uranium waste. This was also mentioned back in October:

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/10 /1 2/2057227&mode=thread&tid=134&tid=191

Other links about bioremediation:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
USGS's site on bioremediation

Quite a lot of information about this bacteria (Geobacter sulfurreducens) can be found at the Geobacter project home page.

There is nothing special about this particular bug, except that it was used to gain some insight on how these kinds of bacteria work their magic.

The whole battery idea comes from how we now understand that the "c-type cytochromes" add electrons to the heavy metal ions to newtralize them, and create a small electrical current in the process.

Yes, in theory I would imagine any bacteria that has similar mechanics could be used.

This little fella jsut happened to get the spotlight because it was the first to be studied in depth.

Ref. http://www.geobacter.org/ for some more info

You might also want to read through the talk.origins archive, since I think you might not fully understand how evolution works. (Hint: "survival of the fittest" is a really poor way to describe it.)
=Smidge=