If bacteria under our feet are busy passing electrons around willy-nilly, could we use them to our advantage? The idea of microbial fuel cells has been around fora while. In sewage plants, for example, anaerobic microbes fed organic waste respire, producing electrons that can be collected on an electrode and harvested to generate electricity. Yet they are not very efficient. Might some basic bioengineering build a better bacterial battery? Derek Lovley's team at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst reasoned that their Ceobocter bacteria strains had evolved over billions of years to optimise iron reduction, not electricity production. But through months of systematically selecting the "fittest" bacteria - those that donated the most electrons to an electrode - they were able to produce a new strain 10 times more efficient at producing electricity (Biosensors and Bioclcctronics, vol 24, p 3498).
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机译：如果我们脚下的细菌忙于在电子附近传递电子，我们是否可以利用它们来发挥我们的优势？微生物燃料电池的想法已经存在了很长时间。例如，在污水处理厂中，喂食有机废物的厌氧微生物会呼吸，产生电子，这些电子可以收集在电极上并收集以发电。但是它们不是很有效。一些基本的生物工程学可能会构建出更好的细菌电池吗？位于阿默斯特马萨诸塞州大学的德里克·洛夫利（Derek Lovley）的研究小组认为，他们的Ceobocter细菌菌株已经进化了数十亿年，以优化铁的还原而不是发电。但是，通过系统地选择“最合适”的细菌（那些向电极贡献最多电子的细菌）进行了数月的研究，它们能够产生一种新菌株，其发电效率提高了10倍（Biosensors and Bioclcctronics，第24卷，第3498页）。
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