The crew used "metabolic rewiring" to further convert the E-coli's food intake to make it similarly consume carbon dioxide to a plant. The rewiring included adding genes that metabolize CO2 and remove genes that usually process sugar compounds.
Study co-author Shmuel Gleizer, a Weizmann Institute of Science postdoctoral fellow, said he and his team wanted to see from an essential scientific perspective if such a significant transformation in the diet of bacteria is possible.