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Re:Capturing bacteria that eat and breathe electricity by xkcd-sucks on Thursday March 07, 2019 @09:34AM (#19328265)
Yes this process is called "drug discovery"/"development" and more specifically "drug screening". Typically new antibiotics are developed vs resistant bacteria because that's clinically relevant.

"In the pipeline" blog https://blogs.sciencemag.org is a really good intro to the field

Re:Capturing bacteria that eat and breathe electricity by bm212 on Thursday March 07, 2019 @02:22PM (#19331234)
The “in the pipeline” blog also contains the “things I won’t work with” section (https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/thin...) which is one of the most awesome reads ever, at least for people with some practical experience of an organic chemistry lab.
Re:Capturing bacteria that eat and breathe electricity by xkcd-sucks on Friday March 08, 2019 @09:31AM (#19337735)
Working as a chemist for a while, one tends to develop an explosion sense. Because it is never your stuff blowing up, but rather the postdoc behind you dumped his peroxide waste into the organic waste bottle or whatever and you're not looking at it.

There's a bunch of very subtle hisses,"stretches", gentle little clinks, "gas expansion into a closed container" that all seem to indicate an explosion is in progress.

Personally, I will pre-consciously teleport out the room when this happens. After leaving the field for more lucrative sofware stuff, it has embarrassed me a few times and saved my skin a few times (shoddy LP cylinder igniting, low pressure plastics getting attached to a soda stream carbonator etc)