Bacterial power cords

摘要

A few years ago, any suggestion that microbes could function as power cables to transmit electric currents across centimetre distances would have been met with scepticism. Yet this is exactly what Pfeffer et al. report on page 218 of this issue. The authors provide compelling evidence linking the presence of long filaments of a previously unknown group of bacteria to the electric currents that couple Sea wat spatially separated geochemical reactions in marine sediments.