That is an interesting piece of work, it makes me wonder what happens if they escape the lab and into the soil around the building. What happens if these guys turn the topsoil into a giant conductive sphere. It will probably do wonders for the RF noise floor, considering everyone would be standing on a giant ground plane.
"The X-ray diffraction analyses suggest that the
metallic-like conductivity of G. sulfurreducens pili can be attributed
to the packing of aromatic amino acids with a characteristic
spacing of 3.2 Å, which enables effective -orbital overlap and
electron delocalization."