By isolating it from a bacterium, Australian researchers demonstrated that this enzyme was capable of mobilizing the hydrogen contained in the air to transform it into energy.
Convert air to electricity? This is what an enzyme would be capable of, according to the work of Australian researchers published in review Nature this Wednesday, March 8. Scientists have indeed studied the functioning of a bacterium living in the soil which mobilizes the hydrogen contained in the surrounding air to transform it into energy.
By analyzing its genetic code, the authors of the study have thus identified, at the origin of this transformation, a specific enzyme called Huc. The latter would be able to “produce an electric current directly when exposed to even minute quantities of hydrogen”, argue the authors.
The challenge for the team of researchers consisted in particular in succeeding in isolating the enzyme from the bacteria. So they had to develop a series of methods to grow these bacteria and then use chemistry to try to isolate the component.
A kind of sustainable natural battery
Even extracted from the bacteria, Huc would be able to convert minute quantities of hydrogen into electricity. The study also shows that the enzyme can be frozen or heated and retains its ability to generate energy.
Thus, for the Australian scientists behind this work, Huc constitutes a kind of sustainable natural battery. “The amount of energy provided by hydrogen in the air would be small, but probably enough to power a biometric monitor, a clock, an LED bulb or a simple computer,” they say.
With more hydrogen at the source, the enzyme “could potentially power larger devices,” the authors say.
This first phase of experimentation nevertheless took place in a laboratory context and on a tiny scale – in milligrams. It is now necessary to move to a higher level, the scale of grams, with the objective of that of kilograms.