Gene engineered viruses and battery?

http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE5317A120090402?feedType=nl&feedName=ustechnology

Washington(Reuters)- Researchers who have trained a tiny virus to do their bidding said on Thursday they made it build a more efficient and powerful lithium battery.

1. They changed two genes in the virus called M13 and got it to do two things; 
2. build a shell made out of a compound called iron phosphate and then attach to a carbon nanotube to make a powerful and tiny electrode. 
3. The iron phosphate is generally not good conductor, but makes a useful battery material when patterned at the nano scale. 
4. Lithium batteries are powerful and light, but they do not release their electrons very quickly. The virus made material did, this translate into more battery power.
   
5. Once you have the right genetic sequence and have the right proteins then you just put them in solution with water and ions and they template the battery in the same way an abalone templates a shell. They build little shells around themselves.
   
6. The team is already working on a second generation battery using materials with higher voltage and electrical capacity, such as manganese phosphate and nickel phosphate said Belcher.
   
7. Such an electrode could conceivably make more powerful memory devices such as MP3 players or cellular telephones and are far more environmentally friendly than current battery technologies said Angela Belcher, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology material scientist who lead the research.
   
8. We could run an iPod on it for about three times as long as current iPod batteries. If we really scale it, it would be used in a car,such scaling is not even close, Belcher cautioned.
   

The technology is inherently green because it involves a live virus, We are having organisms make the material for us. We are confined to temperatures and solvents water that organisms can live in. It's clean technology.