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A comment on New ammonia production process: generates electricity instead of consuming. Parent comment

Re:New ammonia production process: generates electricity ins... by wiredfool on Monday February 06, 2017 @10:36AM (#13580354)
IIRC, ATP is a short lived energy carrier in cells. Instead of harvesting it from cells, it's probably easier to turn that around and use the existing ATP mechanism in cells to generate ammonia.
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Re:New ammonia production process: generates electricity ins... by bleyde on Monday February 06, 2017 @02:32PM (#13583042)
All of the components involved are being extracted from existing cells. There are already plenty of nitrogen fixing bacteria, the sources of their nitrogenase and hydrogenase enzymes.

This is maybe novel in that they got the nitrogenases working in vitro. But from a world changing technology perspective this is a very tiny step compared to re-engineering the enzymes to work off of a different non-biological energy source than ATP.

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