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A new enzyme has been discovered that converts air into electricity. It was confirmed that, using this enzyme, an electric current can be created with very little air. Attention is focused on whether it can be developed into an environmentally friendly technology that ensures electrical energy in the future.
A research team led by Reese Grinter, an Australian researcher at the age of the mother, published the results of a study in the international journal Nature on the 8th (local time) confirming that an enzyme found in bacteria (bacteria) that survive in an extreme environment produces electrical energy from hydrogen.
The research team paid attention to the fact that ‘Mycobacterium smegmatis’, a bacterium that lives in soil, uses hydrogen in the atmosphere as a source of energy. Mycobacterium smegmatis consumes nutrients necessary for survival with very small amounts of hydrogen even in harsh environments such as Antarctica, volcanic craters, and the deep sea. The research team extracted an enzyme used by the bacterium to convert hydrogen into an energy source and observed its detailed structure.
As a result of the analysis, it was confirmed that this enzyme, called ‘huc’, has the function of converting hydrogen into electric current. As a result of closely observing the process of enzyme action using a cryo-electron microscope (cryo-EM), it was found that an electric current is produced even with a very small amount of hydrogen.
The research team said, “This enzyme has been confirmed to generate electricity from hydrogen even in air that is only 0.00005% of the air that humans need to breathe.” It is explained that it is much more efficient than chemical catalysts used to produce electricity from conventional hydrogen.
The hook enzyme was also shown to be very stable. As a result of the experiment, there was no problem with the ability to produce electricity from hydrogen even when the enzyme was frozen or heated to over 80 degrees.
The research team predicted that the hook enzyme could develop into an environmentally friendly technology that generates electricity. This is because the amount of hydrogen required to produce electricity is small and it has been confirmed that it operates stably in various temperature environments.
Researcher Greenter, who led this research, said, “The ability of the hook enzyme to generate electricity is still in the research stage,” but “if long-term research is carried out, it is expected to develop into a technology that can replace the light of the sun, and representative eco-friendly energy production technology,” he said. Through subsequent research, the research team plans to find a way to produce hook enzymes in large enough quantities to generate enough electricity.
