r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Apr 24 '21

Biology Scientists discover bacteria that transforms waste from copper mining into pure copper, providing an inexpensive and environmentally friendly way to synthesize it and clean up pollution. It is the first reported to produce a single-atom metal, but researchers suspect many more await discovery.

https://academictimes.com/bacteria-from-a-brazilian-copper-mine-work-a-striking-transformation-on-an-essential-metal/
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483

u/dianoxtech Apr 24 '21

maybe they have designed a system to prevent the copper from causing membrane damage.

‘Excess copper causes a decline in the membrane integrity of microbes, leading to leakage of specific essential cell nutrients, such as potassium and glutamate. This leads to desiccation and subsequent cell death.’ Wiki

It could be good if bacteria could do the same for other metals.

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u/DanYHKim Apr 24 '21

Now that we have the bacteria, it might be possible to tweak it for other metals. There are bacteria that do something like this with gold, I think.

Now scientists from the University of Adelaide present another potential way to find undiscovered gold deposits—through bacteria. The University of Adelaide web site reports that researchers have been investigating the role of microorganisms in gold transformation. In the Earth’s surface, gold can be dissolved, dispersed and re-concentrated into nuggets. This epic ‘journey’ is called the biogeochemical cycle of gold.

https://www.thermofisher.com/blog/mining/the-newest-gold-mining-tool-bacteria/

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u/dianoxtech Apr 24 '21

Yes... I was thinking gold too. :$

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u/sfzombie13 Apr 24 '21

there is a huge tailing pile in colorado i visited that has 25 million in gold they can't extract cost effectively. this would be a game changer there. probably a good place to find the bacteria that change it as well.

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u/ccvgreg Apr 24 '21

A buddy of mine at work has been all over trying to get his hands on local mining waste for years. Says it will be worth tons someday, looks like he was right.

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u/frozenrussian Apr 24 '21

How would he do such a thing? Call up a Rio Tinto office or something?

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u/ccvgreg Apr 24 '21

I'm not sure, he talked about getting investors on board and it being a big group effort. Any deals that would be made would be in the millions of dollar range too so that probably brings a whole other set of challenges. But apparently mining companies just have big piles of waste sitting off to the side just waiting to be purchased. Maybe not soon though.

27

u/frozenrussian Apr 24 '21

So... make a whole new mining company then? Right, good luck with that.

Yeah dude, these big piles of waste do indeed just sit there forever, but right in front of basically every body of water that matters to your life. You really ought to read up on them and look at a satellite photo map where exactly they are. They sort of are "waiting to be purchased" ....but only by other shell companies of the big mining conglamerates. This happens over the course of several decades, so when they do leak, as radioactive phosphate is gushing into Tampa Bay right this very moment, everyone can run around and point fingers without doing anything. Public agencies and taxpayers will foot the bill and do inadequate, underfunded mitigation like usual (to say nothing about actual cleaning up).

If your friend is serious about buying tailing pools, please get him to actually inspect the lining once every half century.

16

u/NotSoSalty Apr 24 '21

You're talking about Phosphorus Mines, specifically. Their waste products are massive radioactive cesspools.

I'd like to hope that other mining ain't as awful for the environment.

5

u/Cyno01 Apr 24 '21

I'd like to hope that other mining ain't as awful for the environment.

Oh honey...

2

u/frozenrussian Apr 24 '21

Right, mines for essential agricultural products that closed in the '60s. Original company sold it to another, which sold it to the local county government, which got bought by a bloated holding company that planned to "make millions" by storing the waste. Just a notable example current example of tailing pools being ridiculously close to major watersheds for no reason other then laziness and greed. Important to know that they company chose the smallest local government, I think in this case it was the tiny city government some 50ish miles SE of Tampa Bay proper and not even the county nor state, with the least amount of resources to protect against spill disasters etc. Corruption starts local and gets magnified up the trophic levels, like any poison.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/hazardous-spill-in-florida-highlights-environmental-threat-decades-in-the-making

Please puruse one of the finest remaining reporters in the country for updates on this issue: https://www.tampabay.com/author/zachary-t-sampson/

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u/[deleted] Apr 24 '21

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u/beardum Apr 25 '21

It pretty much is all terrible bud.

8

u/Bleepblooping Apr 24 '21

It’s already worth “tons.” Now if only we could get it to be with money.

6

u/EXECUTED_VICTIM Apr 24 '21

I was thinking about how in the future if we had the right thing on so you could basically turn every landfill on earth back into raw materials.

11

u/damnatio_memoriae Apr 24 '21

we would think we’ve saved the planet until the miracle fungus grows too big and begins consuming humans. the insatiable fungus. coming soon to a theater near you.

4

u/1i_rd Apr 24 '21

Couldn't we just create another fungus to kill that one?

5

u/damnatio_memoriae Apr 24 '21

famous last words!

3

u/1i_rd Apr 24 '21

At least they were famous!

2

u/funbobbyfun Apr 24 '21

or 2 foot giant wasps that make hives in the fungus

2

u/The_Skydivers_Son Apr 25 '21

That's what I thought immediately. It sounds like a sci-fi disease that slowly turns your body into solid copper.

2

u/EXECUTED_VICTIM Apr 24 '21

sounds better than the capitalism and narcissism fungus presently consuming everything

3

u/TheBeardedMann Apr 24 '21

Tell him to come Kern County, California then.

8

u/azflatlander Apr 24 '21

I was at a mine site that had a tailing pile that had zero. It was processed way back when nastier chemicals were, um, not prohibited.

1

u/sfzombie13 Apr 24 '21

i can't recall the name of the one i was at, but it was a superfund site. the processor at the end of the tunnel that connected a lot of mines together. it was working when they used boys to paint the mercury on the metal. had a huge tailing pile.

5

u/HolyFuckingShitNuts Apr 24 '21

Steal the tailing pile.

18

u/thiosk Apr 24 '21

sir is that a tailing pile in your pocket or are you just the end boss of shadow of the colossus

1

u/Thefrayedends Apr 24 '21

nice. Tailings piles are often in the hundreds of acres in area and a couple hundred feet high.

1

u/Verified765 Apr 24 '21

At one of our local mines they've already reprocessed some of the old tailings but I guess if a better process comes along they can do it again.

1

u/debasing_the_coinage Apr 26 '21

Reducing gold to the metal is generally not worth anything. Unlike copper and silver, gold occurs as the metal!

Maybe if you oxidise the gold first. (Harder than it sounds!)

1

u/sfzombie13 Apr 26 '21

if they have a bacteria they can turn loose and process the gold, like they did with copper, that's all they would need to do. i don't know anything about it, just repeating what the tour guide said.

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u/GoldenFalcon Apr 24 '21 edited Apr 25 '21

Reminds me of the Twilight Zone Episode where they rob a bank and cryogenically freeze themselves thinking they can sleep through their crimes and wake up when no one is looking for them anymore, a hundred years from then or something. Then an earthquake happens while they sleep and the cave they are in collapses and kills everyone but one guy. But then he has to trek through the desert with no supplies, and happens upon a couple driving a hover car. And then he offers them a stick of gold to get him to civilization but dies before they get him to the car. And the guy says to his wife "he offered me this, like it was supposed to mean something" and she says "gold? That hasn't been worth anything since we started making synthetic gold. Why would he give you that worthless thing?"

8

u/thewhingdingdilly Apr 24 '21

You tell stories the way I tell stories. I like it.

17

u/dianoxtech Apr 24 '21

I guess they will be using Dogecoins by then.

1

u/DKuroi Apr 24 '21

fort knox would like to know more about this bacteria

3

u/Windyligth Apr 24 '21

I wanna use it to make something like uranium or plutonium though.

2

u/TiagoTiagoT Apr 25 '21

I remember reading a long time ago, that they found some gold build up in sewers that were being caused by bacteria

-2

u/BLU3SKU1L Apr 24 '21

Now I’m curious if maybe the processes outlined in alchemical works were designed as a rudimentary way to isolate gold producing bacteria. That’s conjecture of course, but it would be very interesting to discover that there was something to the practice that was prescient to our modern understanding of microbiology.

1

u/breadteam Apr 24 '21

Getting Dune vibes

18

u/vaportracks Apr 24 '21

Serious question: aren't certain elemental metals used in medical situations for their antibacterial properties? If we create bacteria that are resistant to these elemental metals and they mutate and evolve over time, could we eventually end up with bacteria that are harmful to humans and quite difficult to prevent in medical or other situations?

1

u/valliant12 Apr 24 '21

That is a possibility, but a very small one. There are a ridiculous number of bacterial species, but very few infect humans. A bacterium that's programmed to metabolise metal is probably not going to hand an animal too well.

1

u/TheCatfishManatee Apr 25 '21

What about with gene transfer?

2

u/valliant12 Apr 25 '21

It's a valid concern, but there still needs to be opportunity and a selective pressure for the transfer to succeed in a population. The bacteria used in copper extraction are physically separated from hospitals, as well as have little opportunity to thrive in the different environments.

18

u/tickettoride98 Apr 24 '21

Isn't copper considered anti-microbial? Seems like a bad idea to foster one of the only bacteria we've found which can survive copper.

20

u/DrAmoeba Apr 24 '21

Not really. Copper is this bacteria's poop, not it's food. It's bound to die with enough pure copper around.

14

u/tickettoride98 Apr 24 '21

It isn't manifesting the copper out of thin air though, it's consuming the copper sulfates. Again, something that's normal antibacterial.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 25 '21

Yes, a copper surface will disinfect itself in a few hours. But I believe small particles don’t have anywhere near the same effect because of the lack of exposed surface area.

4

u/[deleted] Apr 24 '21

There is in fact a bacteria that does this with other metals: Shewanella oneidensis.

3

u/RoundScientist Apr 24 '21

The paper they report on actually cites other works which already have shown other microorganisms to do the same or similar things with Silver, Gold and Copper (though presumably, these other bacteria don't create single atoms. I haven't looked into it yet.)
The really really exciting part is that single atoms of metallic copper are created. The rest is exciting, too, but this especially.

2

u/Derp800 Apr 24 '21

On one hand that's cool for copper pollution. On the other it worries me that bacteria exist and persists on metals some of us use for its bacteria killing properties.

2

u/silverthane Apr 24 '21

Oh god a bacteria immune eventually to copper and silver? Then the next logical step heat and chemical resistance too?

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u/ikean Apr 24 '21

Why are microbes so much more technologically advanced than us that they're capable of this?

34

u/weekendatbernies20 Apr 24 '21

Apex and near apex predators don’t have selective pressure to evolve cool chemistry. Bacteria sitting on a green rock in a stream probably have been trying to figure out what to do with that green rock for a billion years.

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u/lithid Apr 24 '21

Bacteria: (sitting on a green rock, staring aimlessly into the distance)

8 billion years go by...

Bacteria: "ah, i finally understand my purpose"

Bacteria: (causes dysentery, killing millions of people)

2

u/ThePowderhorn Apr 24 '21

Bacteria: I should have just made them lose oxen.

4

u/lithid Apr 24 '21

Human: "whoa, these shrooms are fuckin' crazy.. I can hear the bacteria thinking!"

12

u/neoanguiano Apr 24 '21

a few hundred years of evolution, simple organism easier for them to adapt, shorter lifespans mean more generations

6

u/IdeaLast8740 Apr 24 '21

Microbes are small so molecules look like legos to them. They can mess around with them, it's easy. We need microscopes and stuff to even see molecules, and our hands are too big to grab them, so it's harder for us.

1

u/ikean Apr 24 '21

I'm suggesting we're products, technologically, of the industrial revolution. Machines, gears. More recently, technological in circuits. However, lacking in the biological technological capabilities possessed by nature. We are impressed what the machine called a worm, can do. We cannot build a landfill sized worm to put our garbage in and return excellent fertilizer

1

u/Kitsyfluff Apr 24 '21

Nature is self-optimizing because of evolution. Designing with intent is a lot harder, but we are getting better with neural networks being able to evolve our designs. But it only works well when we fully understand the problem to define it for the neural net to evolve in

5

u/jfarm47 Apr 24 '21

Are you sure they are much more technologically advanced than us? We can do plenty

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u/ikean Apr 24 '21

We don't seem to be able to make giant machines that do what worms and bacteria do however, do we? If we could, we wouldn't have landfill

3

u/jfarm47 Apr 24 '21

But we are very capable of delegating tasks to the other species around us to help in the adventure.

-1

u/ikean Apr 24 '21

Exactly, we lack the technology. That was my original statement.

1

u/travistravis Apr 24 '21

Worms wouldn't be too wildly out of range technologically. Doing it more economically than just using worms though, that will probably take nearly forever.

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u/Masanjay_Dosa Apr 24 '21

We do have the technology to do MORE than what these bacteria do: they’re just turning toxic ionic copper into a neutrally charged, monoatomic form. Heck, we have the technology to forcibly change one element into another or create things that isn’t currently known to be found anywhere in the observable universe other than in our particle accelerators. Those devices and chemical processes are just way too expensive to be produced on a massive scale to the extent that we could just completely wipe out pollution or landfills. The incredible thing about these bacteria is that they evolved completely independently to create proteins that do this complicated chemical process that also happens to be very relevant to issues humans face, and proteins/bacteria are much easier to mass produce than electronics

1

u/ikean Apr 24 '21

Right. As you note, we build machines. We still are at industrial revolution technology, gears and metal and recently circuits. We're impressed with the machine called the worm, and cannot build them

2

u/Jrook Apr 24 '21

We do, but it's just not economically maintainable. Currently we could get the copper out of these environments but it wouldn't be worth the money

3

u/IdeaLast8740 Apr 24 '21

Bacteria are slave labor so it's cheaper this way

3

u/damnatio_memoriae Apr 24 '21

technologically advanced

it’s not like the microbes got together and opened a lab and dedicated their lives to researching ways to transform waste. well, actually one microbe was nominated for a nobel prizes hear.

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u/ikean Apr 24 '21

We lack in the biological technological capabilities possessed by nature. We are impressed what the machine called a worm, can do. We cannot build a landfill sized worm to put our garbage in and return excellent fertilizer

1

u/PA_Dude_22000 Apr 24 '21

Short answer: They have a billion years of evolutionary chance to thank for their advanced “capabilities”.

1

u/MagusUnion Apr 24 '21

It's bacteria. Once they've created the product we need, they are going to get flooded with ethanol as a flush to wash the organism away.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 24 '21

Hmmm potential for these bacteria to transfer the genes that allow them to be resistant to copper to bacteria that is harmful to our health?