Microbes that eat waste and produce electricity discovered.

Have we found alien life among us? 

And can we utilize it To produce Unlimited electricity

This feature was originally published in the February 2015 issue of Popular Science.

Life, Nealson is explaining, all comes down to energy. From the mightiest 

blue whale to the most humble microbe, every organism depends on moving and manipulating electrons; it’s the fuel that living matter uses to survive, grow, and reproduce. The bacteria at USC depend on energy, too, but they obtain it in a fundamentally different fashion. They don’t breathe in the sense that you and I do. In the most extreme cases, they don’t consume any conventional food, either. Instead, they power themselves in the most elemental way: by eating and breathing electricity. Nealson gestures at his lab. That’s what they are doing right there, right now.

“All the textbooks say it shouldn’t be possible,” he says, “but by golly, those things just keep growing on the electrode, and there’s no other source of energy there.” Growing on the electrode. It sounds incredible. Nealson pivots on his chair to face me and gives a mischievous grin. “It is kind of like science fiction,” he says. To a biologist, finding life that chugs along without a molecular energy source such as carbohydrates is about as unlikely as seeing passengers flying through the air without an airplane.

Shewanella

Shewanella’s outer membrane is full of tiny chemical wires, enabled by specialized proteins, that let it move electricity out of the cell. The wires make direct contact with the manganese oxide, which is how it can deposit electrons and “breathe” a solid substance. Furthermore, Nealson realized that the bacterium doesn’t even care whether the substance on the outside of its membrane is manganese oxide or something else entirely, so long as it will complete the electric circuit.

Geobacter

While Nealson and his team were gathering proof that Shewanella is as extraordinary as it seemed, another microbiologist made a similar discovery. Derek Lovley, then a project chief at the U.S. Geological Survey, found an electron-moving bacterium, Geobacter, living on the bottom of the Potomac River. “Geobacter’s proteins have a completely different evolutionary origin, but they solve the problem the same way,” Nealson says. Finding two unrelated microbes with an affinity for raw electricity provided reassuring evidence that Shewanella wasn’t some one-off weirdo.

At this point, Nealson realized the microbial landscape of the planet might be different than anyone had thought. He also realized he had probably only just begun to explore what electric bacteria are capable of.