Seafloor Communities Create Electricity!
In the digital age, like we all human beings are connected by electriciy all across the land, deep in the sea beds the microbes living also use electricity for communication.
Deep in the oceans, methane gas slowly leaks out of the Earth’s crust, right on the doorstep of remarkable communities of two types of microbes. One type is Methanosarcinales, an acient group of archaea that are basicallly a type of single-celled organism very distantly related to bacteria. Methanosarcinales gobbles up methane gas. Along with them another type of bacteria is a sulfate-eating bacteria called Deltaproteobacteria who also functions for the production of methan gas. Both the microbes work together in a community for the production of methane gas or other greenhouse gases.
Methane is the most powerful greenhouse gas, and can also be a potential source of electricity production, so the more these microbe communities can eat, the better it is for global climate. When the partnerships are successful, they can mop up three-quarters of the methane that leaks from the ocean floor. “It’s a small but kind of wildly unknown part of the earth’s carbon cycle,” said Shawn McGlynn, a microbiologist now at Tokyo Metropolitan University who co-authored a recent experiment on these communities. Learning their secret might allow scientists to build other similar partnerships that can create compounds society needs and the need of today like fuels and destroy those who can cause bad effects on our society like those which produce greenhouse gases.
Another interesting fact is that each microbe digests more efficiently when the other is nearby, so scientists thought one might be providing an ingredient the other needed. But when they looked closely at the communities, they saw that the archaea and bacteria lived much more separate lives than they would have expected if the microbes were exchanging some type of molecule. The two groups of each microbe were near partners, but the microbes clumped with their own kind.
The scientists think the trick of their pathership is electricity. The archaea break down methane and release electrons, creating a negative charge in their neighborhood. The more electrons build up, the harder it is to add more negative charges to an already negatively charged environment, so the archaea can’t break down methane as efficiently. But the bacteria pick up those electrons and use them to digest sulfate, creating a positive charge on Deltaproteobacteria turf. Keeping these charged poles farther apart actually makes it easier to send electricity between groups by creating a stronger electrical gradient. Electrons are generated by the archaea, flow to the bacteria, and are removed from the water, allowing the archaea to continue to break down methane. Studying their community can allow scientists gain perspective on how other microbes may work together, based on electron exchange, spatial organization, or both. From there, he thinks scientists could one day.
McGlynn, along with his team is working on these microbes and have recently confirmed the archaea carry genes for large surface proteins capable of sending electrons on their way. Now, a German team has offered additional data about the same communities. They found that when both types of microbes and methane were in the same area, the bacteria seemed to create wire-like structures that carry electrons to meet the proteins on the archaea that release electrons. He also believes that the understanding of th function of these two organisms can open new feild of study, “scientists could one day design synthetic microbial communities so we can do otherwise impossible reactions.”, he said while talking about it.
Despite the fact scientists aren’t still able to fully understand the partnership and the role of electricity for communication, it is believed that the entire ocean bed may be electrified in the same way our nervous systems are. They’re networks of individual cells connected by electro-chemical signals — essentially they are an enormous multi-cellular organism. These bacteria “breathe” by absorbing oxygen and hydrogen sulfide, emitting water as a byproduct. They might be serving as a vast water purification system on the ocean bottom, or they might be part of a geological process that’s a lot more complex. We also have no way of knowing how other sea creatures are interacting with this giant electrical grid organism.
What matters here is that we’ve just discovered a new kind of life that is not only ubiquitous, but also engaging in electro-chemical processes throughout the oceans. There’s no evidence that this life form is “thinking” in any way that we’d recognize, but it certainly sounds like the perfect opening to a science fiction story.
References
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/carnegie-wave-microgrid-in-australia-2015-11 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2606131/Did-life-begin-Earth-ELECTRICITY-sea-floor-Nasa-claims-organisms-thrived-warm-ocean-vents.html http://scienceline.org/2015/11/seafloor-communities-create-electricity/ https://www.zmescience.com/research/studies/bacteria-forms-electrical-cables-sea-floor-0421343/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3587501/
