Getting to the source
Plenty of strange diets have captured the public imagination over the years, but Harvard scientists have identified what may be the strangest of them all — sunlight and electricity. Led by Peter Girguis, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences, and Arpita Bose, a postdoctoral fellow in organismic and evolutionary biology, a team of researchers has demonstrated that the bacterium Rhodopseudomonas palustris can use natural conductivity to pull electrons from minerals located deep in soil and sediment while remaining at the surface, where it absorbs the sunlight needed to produce energy. The study was described in a Feb. 26 paper in Nature Communications. “When you think about electricity and living organisms, most people default to Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein,’ but we’ve long understood that all organisms actually use electrons — what constitutes electricity — to do work,” Girguis said. “At the heart of this paper is a process called extracellular...