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by cptvideo 2164 days ago
I had a microbiologist friend who said: "If you can name something, there's a bacterium that will eat it".
8 comments

Sounds like a fun HN comment game, let’s go:

Formaldehyde.

How about: Hydrogen fluoride. I know there are acidophiles but a concentrated HF solution in water has a H0 of up to -11, surely no membrane (made of proteins) can survive that?
Dunno about HF specifically but there are bacteria living at extremely low pH in highly concentrated acids from mine runoff at Iron Mountain Mine.
Oh nice. Let’s kick it up a notch:

Chlorine Trifluoride.

Probably one of the chlorine-breathing microbes.

Of course, the hard part is discovering the exact microbe that eats a given compound and publishing/finding an exact paper on it, not naming compounds.

Which input sha256s into d4667a67e71436947c7ff89f31379aeb82d2044f74dbad776941fcd91585e318?3

> Which input sha256s into d4667a67e71436947c7ff89f31379aeb82d2044f74dbad776941fcd91585e318

you found me

I feel like the hardest part would be convincing Chlorine Trifluoride to exist long enough for something to eat it, this one may be unfair.

My last request for the night: Enriched Uranium.

Geobacter, Geothrix and Dyella species, as well as a novel—potentially predatory—Bacteroidetes species, and a new member of class Anaerolineae (Chloroflexi). Additionally, a population of methanogenic Methanocella species. [0]

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29128951/

Polyethylene.
They don't identify the bacterium in the article, but waxworm guts contain them: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkart/2020/03/09/mysterious-...

Pseudomonas bacteria can break down polyurethane, which is a tougher material than polyethylene: https://www.nationofchange.org/2020/03/28/scientists-find-ba...

Tangentially related, mealworms have been studied and found to be able to eat a diet including polystyrene with no ill effects.
Pure fluorine.
neutrino
Black holes. Not a bacterium, but there aren’t a whole lot of options here.
Aqua Rezia
I guess you meant Aqua Regia? Not at all well versed in biology, but that seems less of a challenge than the other materials proposed (heavy metals, etc).

Aqua Regia is a mixture of Nitric Acid and Hydrochloric Acid. At least the first seems easy enough to digest and obtain energy from.

Yes, it is very acidic (ph 0 - 1) but so is your stomache (ph 1.5 - 3.5) and plenty of bacteria survive in that.

Couldn't find a specific species on google though =)

Yep. misspelled it.

ph is a logarithmic scale so the difference between ph ~0 and ph 3 is of 3 orders of magnitude (or something like that. My maths is rubbish...). it can dissolve noble metals so I doubt anything living can survive it. But once diluted, some extremophiles may be live off it. while googling found this interesting article

https://onezero.medium.com/a-new-zealand-startup-is-using-mi...

so yeah, the challenge is halfway broken. science is amazing. :D

Thaumic radiation.
Trump
Not a biologist. far outside of my expertise. Random human, there must be a zillion. E. Coli? I suspect, but do not know, there are tons of human eating bacteria.