FIGURE 1. Natural gas and the chemist.

Here John Dalton (1766–1844) is depicted collecting marsh gas by poking a stick into pond sediments; the artist is Ford Madox Brown. Marsh gas (methane, CH₄, the simplest alkane) is the main component of natural gas. As shown by the work of Zengler et al.⁵, summarized in Fig. 2, new aspects of this economically important bacterial process are still being revealed.

MANCHESTER CITY ART GALLERIES