Could a Chinese supercharged bacterium spark a superhuman revolution?
- Researchers say they created E coli strain that can draw on electrons in the environment
- Scientists’ next task is to see if technique can be applied to complex life forms
Scientists at a government laboratory in northern China say they have edited the DNA of a germ, creating a super bacterium that can use electrons as an energy source, perhaps opening the door to superpowers in humans.
The gene-edited germ uses electricity as “food”, increasing its physical performance by as much as 70 per cent, according to a team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology. In theory, that would be like a human athlete running 100 metres (330ft) in five seconds or jumping over a bar more than four metres off the ground.
The researchers engineered the bacterium by adding an “alien” gene to the DNA of E coli, a germ common in animal intestines. The gene helped generate a protein – a compound that behaves like a worker bee or an information carrier within a cell – that can harvest free-roaming electrons from the environment and turn them into energy.
The Tianjin study was inspired by one of the biggest discoveries in biology over the last two decades, where researchers from around the world discovered a bacterium – Shewanella oneidensis – that generates small but regular electric currents using a protein that moves electrons in and out of cells.
In the future, [this technology] may even give rise to a superhuman race
Scientists could “cut and paste” electrically activated Shewanella oneidensis DNA into almost any living cell to give it the ability to absorb free-roaming electrons, the Tianjin researchers said in findings published in the Biochemical Engineering Journal this year.
