A NEWLY DISCOVERED

ENZYME THAT TURNS

CHEMISTRY
AIR INTO ELECTRICITY
Anusha Shenoy 7B
SCIENTISTS DISCOVERED AN ENZYME THAT PRODUCES
ELECTRICITY FROM AIR:
Australian scientists have discovered an enzyme that converts air into energy. The
finding, published in the journal ”Nature”, reveals that this enzyme uses the low
amounts of hydrogen in the atmosphere to create an electrical current. This
enzyme was present in a common soil worm. Researchers have extracted the
enzyme responsible for using atmospheric hydrogen from a bacterium called
Mycobacterium smegmatis.
This enzyme, called Huc, turns hydrogen gas into an electrical current, it even
consumes hydrogen below atmospheric level, as low as 0.00005% of the air we
breathe.
Huc can be used to develop small-air powered
devices, such as a spray gun.
Converting waste plastic bottles into jet fuel:
Plastic waste can be turned into cyclic and aromatic hydrocarbons, which can then be used as
important components of diesel and jet fuel.
A huge amount of plastic is discarded after use, causing big environmental problems. This
issue has recently been gaining increasing global attention. A team led by Tao Zhang and Ning
Li from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics in China has come up with a process to
convert common plastics into jet fuels or diesel.
Aromatics are absorbed by polymer seals within the
engine, better than the alkanes used in regular fuels.
PET from plastic bottles is first broken down into dimethyl
terephthalate using methanol, once the reaction has cooled, it
settles into a solid, which can easily be split, so the methanol can be re-used. Then the solid is
then converted into the desired hydrocarbons by hydrogenation followed by
hydrodeoxygenation. This avoids generating unnecessary waste streams – and the use of
heterogeneous catalysts.
The technique, therefore, appears to be a promising way to divert plastic waste away from
landfill.