Bravo, except for the part where one bacteria can turn copper into gold with CupA. CupA is actually a pump on the wall of the bacteria that can pump out toxic heavy metals. Only the sun & stars can turn copper & lead into gold, adding frustration of medieval pharmacists & chemists.

Thanks for turning me onto this unknown species. You do have a nose for buried bacteria & possibly truffles.

One of your citations speculated using c. metallidurans as metal detectors for not only gold. This bacteria would replace the ones bought on Amazon.

I'd venture to say we are a score away from having vats of C. metallidurans refine our gold rather than traditional methods of using toxic chemicals to extract toxic heavy metals such as cyanide & chlorine. I can see it now, vats of C. metallidurans swimming in a vat of suspended crushed ore like some CoViD-19 vaccines & drugs.

I took the liberty of calculating the gold from 1 bacterium with a gold nugget of 1 um3. It would be worth 0.00000000006 cents? I could be off by a thousandth. But, if you grow a vat of a billion C. metalliduran like labs do with liquid culture, you could achieve a density of a billion/ml!

That would be roughly 6 cents per milliliter for all your hard work panning for gold at today’s price of $60/gram.

Thought-provoking how all bacteria from the moment they were born, they knew P-Chem & can wield a pick-axe with baby fingers or cilia. I barely passed my organic chemistry years ago. I feel ashamed rather than envious. We have digits; they don’t. We grow them in a vat, use them & kill them with bleach. Sound familiar somehow.

Nothing to be ashamed about when we’ve got bacteria accumulating Au then we’re kings & queens of the animal kingdom.