By Meaghan Sullivan: Graduate students from the Malvankar Lab, Patrick O’Brien and Vishok Srikanth, were part of a collaboration between researchers at Yale, University of Virginia, and UC Irvine to solve the structure of bacterial nanowires. Scientist had always thought that bacteria, like Geobacter, which live in anoxic environments, would use type IV pili to move electrons generated during respiration out of the cell. But using electron cryo-microscopy (cryo-EM), the team discovered the functional unit of the nanowires was completely different than predicted! The hexahaeme cytochrome OmcS holds hemes close enough in the nanowire to shuttle electrons, accounting for the conductivity of these amazing bacterial structures. The work was published on April 4 in Cell. (Wang et al. Structure of microbial nanowires reveals stacked hemes that transport electrons over micrometers. Cell. 2018; 177: P361-369).