Some bacteria can use electricity directly as a power source

The original title is obviously misleading. It can't transform electricity into cell walls, etc. It is able to use electricity directly as an energy source to do such things as build cell walls.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/nature/bacteria-can-survive-electricity-alone/

Posted by Allison Eck on Mon, 21 Jul 2014

This Bacterium Can Survive on Electricity Alone

Scientists are hoping that a large battery in a South Dakotan gold mine could lure curious forms of bacteria that may help us understand what powers life as we know it.

That’s because scientists have begun to discover bacteria that live and thrive on electricity alone. Rather than mediating electrons through third-party materials (such as sugar or oxygen) like most organisms do, these bacteria transmit them unaccompanied by anything else.

Here’s Catherine Brahic, writing for New Scientist:

Unlike any other living thing on Earth, electric bacteria use energy in its purest form—naked electricity in the shape of electrons harvested from rocks and metals. We already knew about two types, Shewanella and Geobacter. Now, biologists are showing that they can entice many more out of rocks and marine mud by tempting them with a bit of electrical juice. Experiments growing bacteria on battery electrodes demonstrate that these novel, mind-boggling forms of life are essentially eating and excreting electricity.

And scientists have found more than just a few new examples. Annette Rowe, a doctoral student at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, has identified up to eight specimens demonstrating this behavior. That suggests to her advisor, Kenneth Nealson, that there could be a whole slew of organisms involved in direct extraction of electrons.

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