• When the Mi­crobe Hits the Metal

    by Leo Baum­gart — Some heavy met­als share a long his­tory with mi­crobes. Many of the meta­bolic processes that sus­tain life are be­lieved to have orig­i­nated from spon­ta­neous re­ac­tions in­volv­ing met­als present in the early Earth. Our mi­cro­bial an­ces­tors fig­ured out quickly how to use...

  • The Art of Mi­cro­bial Alchemy

    by Gemma Reguera — In 2001, Kashefi and col­lab­o­ra­tors pub­lished an ar­ti­cle in 'Ap­plied and En­vi­ron­men­tal Mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy' re­port­ing the sur­pris­ing find­ing that sev­eral iron-re­duc­ing mi­crobes can use gold as an elec­tron ac­cep­tor for their res­pi­ra­tion. These mi­cro­bial al­chemists in­cluded both mesophilic and ther­mophilic bac­te­ria...