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Cable bacteria are living batteries
How a discovery in a Danish lake changed our understanding of biological communities and energy.
Under a cloudless August sky, I sailed upon an InterCity train from København station to Aarhus, an 8th-century Viking settlement that is now the second largest city in Denmark. Although Aarhus University is not widely known outside Denmark (it wasn’t founded until the 1920s), it was here where scientists first identified the properties of the cable bacteria that I watched through Marshall’s microscope — a microbe that has revised much of what biologists know about bioenergetics. Indeed, nearly a century ago, the Dutch microbiologist Albert Jan Kluyver wrote: “From the point of view of energy metabolism, there is only one biology.” He meant that all life, from microbes to humans, relies on electron transfer from donor to acceptor.
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