I just finished going through this paper, and honestly, I have a couple of things that are really bugging me. Maybe I’m missing something, but here’s what’s on my mind:
So, they keep talking about engineered living energy materials as if it’s one big happy family of stuff. But then half the time they’re talking about actual living bacteria that can grow and adapt, and the other half they’re talking about purified proteins sitting on electrodes. Those two things are totally different! A protein sitting on a piece of metal isn’t living anything, it’s just a molecule that’s going to degrade in a few hours. How can they lump them together like that without acknowledging that one of them completely lacks the whole self-regeneration superpower they keep bragging about?
And here’s the other thing, for most of these hybrid systems, the hardest part is getting electrons to actually move between the living cell and the artificial stuff. It’s like trying to have a conversation through a brick wall. They mention it, sure, but they don’t really sit with how big of a problem this is. The transfer rates are terrible, nobody really understands what’s happening at that interface, and it’s basically a black box. So how can we take any of these efficiency numbers seriously when the fundamental science of what’s happening at that handshake point is still so unclear?