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Hydrogen-Emitting Microbe Examined
Concerned Onlooker wrote to mention an article at Science Daily discussing a microbe that lives in volcanic environments, which emits Hydrogen gas as a waste product. "As the world increasingly considers hydrogen as a potential biofuel, technology could benefit from having the genomes of such microbes. 'C. hydrogenoformans is one of the fastest-growing microbes that can convert water and carbon monoxide to hydrogen," remarks TIGR evolutionary biologist Jonathan Eisen, senior author of the PLoS Genetics study. "So if you're interested in making clean fuels, this microbe makes an excellent starting point.'"
>If you remove the oxygen, won't you be left with Hydrogen anyway?
It was referring to the atmospheric oxygen (O2). This microbe is anaerobic.
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Plants get their hydrogen from water -- so I can see getting hydrogen from GM plants as being useful, especially since they are cheap solar cells.
A current method of getting hydrogen is by passing steam over coal -- basically burning coal in water. I can't imagine it being much different to burn carbon monoxide in water to get steam, but maybe these bacteria do it more efficiently than we can?
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It might live near a volcano. It doesn't live in it! Even the most extreme extremophile is only able to withstand aroudn 120 degC. Nothing like the 700+ found in the heart of volcanos. The environment might be hard to replicate but not because of the temperature. More likely it will be hard to replicate because we probably don't properly understand the chemistry of the bacterias natural environment.
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So, while you might be quick to think "we still need to burn fossil fuels to produce this hydrogen", the point is, currently it's a WASTE material.
That's in the eye of the beholder. Solid oxide fuel cells can use carbon monoxide as fuel just as well as hydrogen. Carbon monoxide is a fairly energy rich substance. The guy who first prepared it in 1776 by heating ZnO and coke even thought he had made hydrogen because the blue flame it produces is so similar. I don't have numbers for CO and H2 handy, and if I did I'd be too lazy to check, but I'd suspect that burning a mole of CO releases more energy than burning a mole of H2, just by virtue of the fact that this bacterium makes its living converting H2O + CO -> CO2 + H2.
I assume they're carbon based life forms
Of course they are. Carbon monoxide is a fairly energy rich substance and is surprisingly inert. It kills you by forming a stable complex with the hemoglobin in your blood. It adheres to binding sites meant for oxygen (cyanide has an even greater affinity) and ruins the entire hemoglobin molecule. Bacteria generally have no use for oxygen binding and transport proteins, and do not use hemoglobin or any other heme-containing protein (except for nitrogen-fixing bacteria), so in general one would not expect them to care about carbon monoxide- although being able to eat it is impressive.
There is a good 14min broadcast of whats involved with hydrogen as a viable fuel source.t ml
I believe the question of where to get the hydrogen from is discussed and microbes come up.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3210/01.h
Yea, any syngas manufacturer could use it to refine their product into H2. With biproducts being heat, coke for blast furnaces, and anti-dandruff shampoo.
Inputs are bituminous coal. We have something like 300 years+ of the stuff sitting in the poorest rural area of the US, Appalachia.
Methane has no smell. Otherwise the gas companies would have no need to add the artificial smell to mains and bottled gas (at least they do in UK). What you're smelling are probably sulphur compounds.
-- Soruk
In industry, this process is called a water gas shift reaction. This is a *very* mature technology which has been used since the days of gas lighting.
CO + H20 -> CO2 + H2
This wouldn't be the first microbe investigated to replace water gas shift reactors, but previous examples would need to come a long way to even approach the economy of the inorganic method.
Except that the article didn't say anything about that bacterium's photosynthetic abilities. On the contrary, the article is making it pretty clear that the bacterium gets its energy by oxydizing carbon monoxyde to carbon dioxyde. Part of the energy goes into the hydrogen, and another part (the most important for the organism itself) goes into reducing CO to C for its own needs. However, it should be obvious than any energy that can be gained by oxydizing that C is much less than what went into making it in the first place. So, yes, you can reclaim some CO by durning the "dead" bacteria, but you will get far less of it than what it consumed during its life. You do need an external source of CO to keep the process going (in nature, this source is volcanic, and in industry it will have to be an incomplete combustion nearby that will need other fuels in addition to the bacteria themselves.)
Nonsense.
Conversion of carbon or oxygen to hydrogen requires nuclear fission.
No such life form exists outside science fiction.
Post tenebras lux. Post fenestras tux.
The paper was published in an Open Access journal so you can all browse that if the press release is too basic. Go to http://genetics.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request =get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pgen.0010065
Certainly if by survive you mean supendining metabolic activity, in a bacteria context it's called sporulative form as oppose to spores in fungi which is more of a "seed-like" form. The bacteria in the article are spore orming, When growing conditions aren't right, they form spores and go into a hardened form of bacteria "suspended animation" until conditions improve. Anthrax does this as the article mentions, I've heard of anthrax spores being infective on the order of decades.
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