A new wave of chemists is on the horizon – and they are called microbiologists. Every day, it seems, I read an article about the use of bacteria to perform chemical synthesis, a job that rightly belongs to chemistry graduate students. Hydrogen, biodiesel fuels, drugs, and a few other organic compounds whose names I don’t remember are being produced by trained bacteria. I don’t know how many of these processes are commercially viable.... yet.... but I’m afraid it’s only a matter of time before graduate students will have nothing left to do other than caring for the bacteria in their labs.
In a similar and yet totally unrelated vein, here is another report detailing the use of bacteria to remove uranium from waste water.
According to the report:
“Bacteria, in this case, E. coli, break down a source of inositol phosphate (also called phytic acid), a phosphate storage material in seeds, to free the phosphate molecules. The phosphate then binds to the uranium forming a uranium phosphate precipitate on the bacterial cells that can be harvested to recover the uranium.”
While I’m sure we can probably always use another new technique for the removal of toxic heavy metals, I cannot help but wonder if having radioactive bacteria running around out in the open is such a good idea. I realize the radiation levels are pretty low, but this still seems like the basis for a movie on the Science Fiction channel.
----------------------------------------------
On another note, the 2009 Ig Noble awards have been announced and they are as funny as ever. The Chemistry prize goes to Javier Morales, Miguel Apátiga, and Victor M. Castaño for creating diamonds from tequila. I sure hope they have an MSDS for the starting material. The link is here. Thanks to Anne Marie Helmenstine's blog for the original link.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
This is something I foresee as inevitable. Most enzymatic and bacterial processes are not commercially viable from what I have seen. But it seems like most syntheses are not either. Once we can design molecules with bacteria, graduate students in OChem are going to become obsolete. I don't see why so much work goes into synthesis these days when there is a so much better way to obtain our slave labor.
The reason so much work goes into OChem is beacuse bacterial enzymes tent to be very specific for only a certain target.
For example, phenylacetone monooxygenase is great at catalyzing Baeyer−Villiger reactions but its scope is limited to only a few substrates.
Mitch
Any solution or precaution is there for remove this bacteria from the root itself.
Though the article is a bit lengthy, but I really enjoyed reading it. Your post is very much informative and makes my friends to go through it. Keep posting .Thanks.
3G Mobile Phones.
Perfect! I never thought that bacteria did that.
Thank you.
Post a Comment