Research-GEOMICROBIOLOGY

Rock eating microbes from marine sediments isolated from electrodes

AR_Catalina

Electrons, it’s what’s for dinner…

We know from work in the 1980’s that microbes can breathe mineral (use them as an electron sink), and that these microbe-mineral interactions are the cornerstone of Geomicrobiology. However, the converse process—how microbes eat mineral (use them as an electron source)—is a process that we know almost nothing about. We know that there are microbes that utilize inorganic (non-carbon) electron sources (i.e., hydrogen, sulfide, iron), however most of what we know stems from dissolved rather than solid forms.  While there are a lot of good reasons for this, one of them being that these organisms are difficult to culture in the lab, I set out to correct this by culturing microbes that could utilize solid mineral and electrodes as electron sources. I started with electrodes and in the process developed techniques and protocols for electrocultivation. Now I’m working on figuring out how these microbes do what they do—perform extracellular electron transfer from a solid source, taking those electrons and using them to conserve energy. This is now a main focus in my research group, where we utilize high through put genetic techniques (TN-seq) to figure out the genes involve that we will ultimately characterize.  

Enrichment and Isolation Overview

The ground work published in Frontiers in Microbiology: Rowe et al., 2015

Look for follow up work on the genomics and cool EET mechanisms in these bugs, coming soon!

 Astrobiology, Bioremediation, Ecology in MicrobesElectromicrobiology, Environmental Microbiology, and Geomicrobiology