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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.'"
I can just see it now. Some of these get dropped into an ocean, multiply, and eventually deconstruct the majority of the world's water into oxygen and hydrogen. It's the end of the world!!
It still takes energy to split the molecule, and it has to come from somewhere, even if viruses to the dirty work.
Despite the self-limiting nature of the technique they describe, whether it ends up working in production or not, I guarantee you that, in a matter of days, someone is going to be flogging a script around Hollywood studios about a runaway virus destroying all the water on earth and the team of hot, young scientists who save the day at the last possible minute by using something compounded from randomly selected Greek and Latin roots.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
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.
If the net effect is a positive for the virus, the behavior would have evolved on it's own in nature. If it's a negative, the virus will be out competed by other viruses. Even if it's neutral, it will at most fulfill its current niche and the water splitting abilities will be lost to genetic drift since it doesn't convey any advantage. In other words: Nothing is going to go wrong, control your irrational fears of genetic engineering and biotechnology.
The actual splitting of water is done by using a pigment to absorb sunlight, then transferring the energy to indium oxide as a catalyst to split water. That's old news. Good, but old.
The problem is that it's hard to keep them doing this efficiently; things tend to clump up. They came up with a way to use viruses to make a structure that keeps everything separate. Viruses are good for building self-assembling structures; this is also old news in nanotech.
Putting it all together here, that's news, but not terribly exciting news, since it's all still in a lab and not scaled to industrial sizes. So the PR department buffs it up with a misleading headline about viruses splitting water.
So no, you don't have to worry about the virus eating the world. It's all about indium oxide, which is not self-replicating. The viruses are just a piece of the machinery.
Before anyone more think this will split water molecules magically. It also requires a catalyst, so it will not spread by itself in the ocean.
Missing totally from the article, is any hard numbers about efficiency. Is it converting solar energy at 1%, 10%, 20% ? How is compared to PV-cells? If it is anywhere near, it could be very neat to get your solar energy as hydrogen instead of electricity. Hydrogen can be stored and converted to electricity when you need it.
Sure, except for this bit:
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.
If this virus ever got loose it would no longer be inside the microgel matrix, so it would soon lose its efficiency at generating hydrogen, becoming just another virus among many—and one ill-adapted to survive outside a lab.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
That's right. It's the scientist speak for zombies. Can't call it zombies, though, cuz they'd get sued by the Hollywood IP zombies.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Some important information is missing from the summary. The viruses don't do the splitting. They profide a scaffold for the synthetic catalyst (iridium oxyde here) which catalyzes dissociation of water by sunlight. So this is a form of solar energy using a clever catalytic nanomaterial, not some mysterious virus-based energy as the summary makes it sound.
Gravitation is a theory, not a fact.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Great for leading your people to freedom from Nanopharaoh.
If the net effect is a positive for the virus, the behavior would have evolved on it's own in nature.
Evolution does not guarantee that any given mutation will occur.
Actually the water in the zombies will all get broken down into hydrogen and oxygen so we're good.
My new car runs on zombies!
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Impossible. You need energy input to split water. No amount of catalysts can help you - first law of thermodynamics comes to rescue, as usual.
Since the viruses use sunlight to convert water, all we would need to do is to stay in a dark room.
A large tin foil hat can also be used.
1. it's not self-catalyzing, it takes iridium oxide which is what you might call highly uncommon (though they implied there might be others, but if they needed to start with Ir02 the list must have been very very short)
2. they didn't say under what conditions it reproduces, but i wouldn't be surprised if the open ocean isn't its best culture medium, or even a decent one
3. in order to get it to work for any sort of duration they had to encase the virus in a gel. now, unless they plan to mutate the virus to produce its own gel, or not to need the gel, it's not going to threaten very much of any body of water
4. we could use a little more oxygen, as ours is being bound up into CO2 by people who persist in believing that burning coal & oil is a god-given right
ATTN: All people including parent who don't understand how long and with how much effort a virus needs to effectively cross barriers between species of hosts (let alone viruses like these that affect prokaryotic bacteria jumping to fucking eukaryotic animals! Are you kidding me?)
Please STFU. You paranoia is sourced in horror movies and cheap sci-fi novellas. Go read about real microbiology. Thanks.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
You don't need a virus to do that... just a match.
Now the second law comes to the rescue - you need temperature gradients to extract energy.
Then they should make a variant of the virus that splits C02.
I didn't know that was a bacterial virus, I thought it was a plant. Who knew? Wow!
Yea they are called plants.
Neutrons are slippery little rascals, they can fool you. They can bounce and show up around corners you don't expect.
Oh, great! Now you've convinced us that this virus is going to suck all of that massive amount energy from the surrounding water causing the oceans to freeze (until Mr. Global Explosion lights his match). Concurrent doomsday scenarios, where one doomsday triggers other concomitant doomsdays: 1) If the lack of water doesn't get us, then 2) the massize cooling will get us, or else 3) the Hindenberg-like atmosphere fire will surely finish us off.
We don't need a virus for that. We have cyanobacteria, which have been producing oxygen via photosynthesis for 2.8 billion years or so. Plants can do it too, but cyanobacteria are small, ubiquitous and efficient, just like your hypothetical virus.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Perhaps they could use light as the energy source required. You could even make sugar with it! But you'd need to collect the sunlight - since red and blue are the highest-energy colors, it would need to be a green pigment.
If only such a thing existed...
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
I don't think Hydrogen or Oxygen are 'toxic'.
If you've made it this far down, you've waded through a river of bullshit. From the half-cocked fear mongering Luddites, past the post-intellectuals joking about doomsday, over the no-news-is-new crowd that already knew about this, to the same old arguments we have about oil and alternative energy.
So congrats, you owe yourself a beer. Now get back to work.
This is in fact, precisely one of the bigger challenges with Hydrogen as an energy storage/delivery medium. It's not so easy to store it, or pipe it over long distances. Its molecules are so tiny that they diffuse through almost anything, leaking out and embrittling the tank or pipe in the process.
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. (Isaac Asimov)
I'm no big tree hugger, but as an animal I have come to form an emotional relationship with the earth and I would prefer that while, we recognize that changes to come to the environment and biosphere, that, we not go around pissing on things all over the place either. Like, I don't think its entirely wrong to ask people to respect the world they live in. Like, I never understood how my fellow right wingers could be so up and up on God, and not ponder for a moment that the earth should be respected because it is His gift to us. I would expect them to be leading the charge on the environment, not dragging their feet on it.
This is my sig.
Pick your own reply:
A) Tell that to an anaerobic organism.
OR
B) philosophical question: Is the global firestorm, caused by a spark igniting the H and O mixture, toxic?