Microbes and Electricity – A Journey through Earth’s History

FREE: Thursday, October 14 @ 7:00 PM-8:30 PM

FREE and OPEN to ALL. Middle and high school students welcome and encouraged to attend. Registration required. REGISTER below! Registrants receive Zoom link to join via email immediately after registering.

Featured Speaker: Arpita Bose, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Biology and Principal Investigator, the Bose Lab; Packard Foundation Fellow and Anant Fellow for Climate Action, Department of Biology, Washington University in St. Louis

Arpita Bose talks about how the Bose Lab is studying modern microbes whose ancient relatives might have led to the deposition and formation of our largest source of iron ore in sedimentary rock structures called Banded Iron Formations (BIFs). Geologists and geo-microbiologists argue about the ancient microbiological processes that might have led to BIF deposition, including the seeming impossibility of microbes surrounded by rust to survive and even grow while being embedded in these iron coffins. Arpita and her Bose Lab colleagues have accumulated substantial evidence showing this feat can indeed be accomplished by BIF depositing microbes that are using electrical current through rust; and she shares how the Lab is leveraging this process today to find climate change solutions.

Microbes and Electricity is a Science in St. Louis Series partnership program of the The Academy of Science – St. Louis and the St. Louis Public Library.