Episode 60: Bacteria that Grows Metal Cables

In episode 60 we crawl into the muck and find a creature that does not wait for a plug. It grows its own power lines out of nickel it steals from the dirt, braids them thinner than thought, and runs electricity through a body that can be thousands of cells long.

The discovery is real. The new structural work is led by Filip Meysman at the University of Antwerp, with colleagues including Bent Smets and Silvia Hidalgo Martinez. It landed in Nature Communications under a title that sounds like an electrician’s fever dream: highly efficient long-range conduction through a biosynthetic nickel-organic framework.

Sources

https://thedebrief.org/scientists-discover-bacteria-growing-microscopic-electrical-wires-with-extraordinary-conductivity/

https://www.science.org/content/article/metal-scaffolds-turn-bacteria-live-wires

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-76989-0

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.10.681601v1

https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.13117

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24312-4

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8238962/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12115-7

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_bacteria

https://asm.org/articles/2022/july/cable-bacteria-electric-marvels-of-the-microbial-w