A multinational research team has discovered filamentous
bacteria that function as living power cables in order to transmit electrons
thousands of cell lengths away.
The Desulfobulbus bacterial cells, which are only a few
thousandths of a millimeter long each, are so tiny that they are invisible to
the naked eye. And yet, under the right circumstances, they form a
multicellular filament that can transmit electrons across a distance as large
as 1 centimeter as part of the filament’s respiration and ingestion processes.
The discovery by scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark
and USC will be published in Nature today.