Cellular-electrical connections have the potential to combine the specialties of the technological world with those of the living world. However, cell membranes are natural insulators, inherently creating a barrier between intracellular electrons and inorganic materials. The dissimilatory metal-reducing microbe, Shewanella oneidensis MR-1, has overcome this barrier by using an electron transport pathway (ETP) to transport electrons to extracellular minerals. We seek to generalize this ability to grow electrical contacts between microbes and inorganic materials, and thus have genetically re-engineered a portion of the Shewanella ETP into Escherichia coli. These 'electrified' strains exhibit ~8x and ~4x faster metal reducing efficiency with soluble metals and insoluble metal oxides, respectively, than wild-type E. coli. These experiments provide the first steps towards building microbial-electrical interfaces, and furthermore demonstrate synthetic biology's potential to rationally engineer cells as materials.  Our next objective is to measure direct electrical output from the 'electrified' strains to an electrode.

Building electrical conduits in living cells

243rd National Meeting (2012)

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