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rain wrote (edited )

I don’t have much to say other than….

That is so cool! I didn’t think there were any bacteria you could see with the naked eye

And im really curious how you can reverse the breathing process for a net gain in energy. I mean that really breaks my brain, it’s awesome

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WRETCHEDSORCERESS OP wrote

For sure! Biology is wonderful in that it will counter any assumption we make about it. Every rule, somewhere, is broken.

For the reverse kreb cycle, I typoed and said energy when I meant carbon! While we use the krebs cycle to generate units of energy currency, it used the reverse to make carbon from CO². It is a similar mechanism to how photosynthetic organisms use ambient carbon dioxide to make all of their biomass, but it is effectively running breathing in reverse to make its body.

It extracts energy from sulfides and nitrate, which is still really cool to me because these are inorganic materials. We think that all life is dependent on the sun/photosynthesis but you get chemoautotrophic exceptions like this and I love them.

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