Image via USC School of Medicine

E. Coli doesn’t bring up the most comforting of images, but that might soon change if a professor in Texas A&M University has anything to say about it. Thomas Wood, a professor in the Artie Mcferrin Department of Chemical Engineering, is genetically modifying the bacteria in hopes that it could one day be a source of energy. Is it time to start thinking of these little guys as cuddly tree huggers? Not quite, but possibly.

The bacteria work by turning sugar in a naturally occurring glucose-conversion process into hydrogen and by deleting six specific genes in the DNA, they’ve been able to supercharge the bacteria to produce 140 times more hydrogen than they could create naturally. Don’t worry about the safety or the risk of E Coli breakouts, there are only very few, specific of the many strains that are dangerous to humans. We live with most of the harmless common strains everyday, and some even help us fend off harmful bacteria.

The advantages to this process are huge. One of the biggest is the energy involved. The typical tried-and-true method is to break down water into it’s basic properties, oxygen and hydrogen, but the process takes a lot of energy. The E Coli bacteria powerhouses requires no external energy source and no heating, just the sugar as the fuel, which could mean huge reduction in energy costs.

These scientists didn’t stop there with their hypothesising either. They’ve thought about the potentially dangerous need to transporting the hydrogen (no blimps this time). They’ve devised a concept of creating the hydrogen on-site with a system which would be fed sugar to provide power to individual houses and buildings.

Their goal now is to tweak the bacteria further so it would require far less sugar than it possibly does to power one house, from 80kg to 8.

Via: ScienceDaily