Post by lowell on Mar 9, 2023 14:03:02 GMT -6
"Clean energy breakthrough as electricity is produced out of thin air"
By Bronwyn Thompson
March 09, 2023
"Years of research pays off for PhD student Ashleigh Kropp (left) and Rhys Grinter" Jordan Robson/Monash University
'While most of us will never bear witness to them, many of the world’s smallest organisms have some incredible means of survival. Some soil bacteria, for example, can gobble up hydrogen from the air and use it for fuel if starved of any other food.
It’s exactly this microbiological trickery that set researchers from Monash University in Australia on a long path to locating and isolating an enzyme from Mycobacterium smegmatis that processes the consumed hydrogen and outputs it as electricity. Now, this has the potential to be harnessed for use to power things such as small devices and implants.
“We've known for some time that bacteria can use the trace hydrogen in the air as a source of energy to help them grow and survive, including in Antarctic soils, volcanic craters, and the deep ocean," said Chris Greening, microbiology professor at Monash and co-author of this study. "But we didn't know how they did this, until now."
While hydrogen only makes up 0.00005% of the atmosphere, this isolated hydrogen catalyzing enzyme, which the team called Huc, is able to consume it easily. And while bacteria removes 70 million tonnes [77 million tons] of hydrogen yearly from the air, the molecular structure of Huc sees the enzyme split the hydrogen molecules to form an electron transport chain, essentially producing an electrical circuit in the cell.
"Huc is extraordinarily efficient," says lead author Rhys Grinter from the university’s Biomedicine Discovery Institute. "Unlike all other known enzymes and chemical catalysts, it even consumes hydrogen below atmospheric levels – as little as 0.00005% of the air we breathe.”
It took the team five years and several dead ends to isolate Huc, but once they did they were amazed at many aspects of this little powerhouse. As well as its insensitivity to oxygen (which poisons many hydrogen catalyzers), it offers extremely versatile and lengthy storage, and is like a battery that never runs out of juice – as long as there’s even a tiny amount of hydrogen bouncing around in the air.
"It is astonishingly stable," said Ashleigh Kropp, PhD candidate and co-author of the study. "It is possible to freeze the enzyme or heat it to 80 °C [176 °F], and it retains its power to generate energy. This reflects that this enzyme helps bacteria to survive in the most extreme environments.”
However, it’s a little premature to be celebrating Huc’s imminent commercial success. The scientists have so far only generated a small amount of charge from an equally small supply of the enzyme.
But it’s an incredible finding for the team, which set out simply to better understand how bacteria work in the environment. And while its practical use suggests the first step would be to aim for it serving as battery cells for small devices, such as clocks, LED globes or simple computers, Grinter believes that with time, funding and massively increasing the density of the enzyme, powering a car is a future possibility.
"Once we produce Huc in sufficient quantities, the sky is quite literally the limit for using it to produce clean energy,” he added.
The research was published in the journal Nature. '
Source: Monash University
By Bronwyn Thompson
March 09, 2023
"Years of research pays off for PhD student Ashleigh Kropp (left) and Rhys Grinter" Jordan Robson/Monash University
'While most of us will never bear witness to them, many of the world’s smallest organisms have some incredible means of survival. Some soil bacteria, for example, can gobble up hydrogen from the air and use it for fuel if starved of any other food.
It’s exactly this microbiological trickery that set researchers from Monash University in Australia on a long path to locating and isolating an enzyme from Mycobacterium smegmatis that processes the consumed hydrogen and outputs it as electricity. Now, this has the potential to be harnessed for use to power things such as small devices and implants.
“We've known for some time that bacteria can use the trace hydrogen in the air as a source of energy to help them grow and survive, including in Antarctic soils, volcanic craters, and the deep ocean," said Chris Greening, microbiology professor at Monash and co-author of this study. "But we didn't know how they did this, until now."
While hydrogen only makes up 0.00005% of the atmosphere, this isolated hydrogen catalyzing enzyme, which the team called Huc, is able to consume it easily. And while bacteria removes 70 million tonnes [77 million tons] of hydrogen yearly from the air, the molecular structure of Huc sees the enzyme split the hydrogen molecules to form an electron transport chain, essentially producing an electrical circuit in the cell.
"Huc is extraordinarily efficient," says lead author Rhys Grinter from the university’s Biomedicine Discovery Institute. "Unlike all other known enzymes and chemical catalysts, it even consumes hydrogen below atmospheric levels – as little as 0.00005% of the air we breathe.”
It took the team five years and several dead ends to isolate Huc, but once they did they were amazed at many aspects of this little powerhouse. As well as its insensitivity to oxygen (which poisons many hydrogen catalyzers), it offers extremely versatile and lengthy storage, and is like a battery that never runs out of juice – as long as there’s even a tiny amount of hydrogen bouncing around in the air.
"It is astonishingly stable," said Ashleigh Kropp, PhD candidate and co-author of the study. "It is possible to freeze the enzyme or heat it to 80 °C [176 °F], and it retains its power to generate energy. This reflects that this enzyme helps bacteria to survive in the most extreme environments.”
However, it’s a little premature to be celebrating Huc’s imminent commercial success. The scientists have so far only generated a small amount of charge from an equally small supply of the enzyme.
But it’s an incredible finding for the team, which set out simply to better understand how bacteria work in the environment. And while its practical use suggests the first step would be to aim for it serving as battery cells for small devices, such as clocks, LED globes or simple computers, Grinter believes that with time, funding and massively increasing the density of the enzyme, powering a car is a future possibility.
"Once we produce Huc in sufficient quantities, the sky is quite literally the limit for using it to produce clean energy,” he added.
The research was published in the journal Nature. '
Source: Monash University