Air-cathode microbial fuel cell array for electrochemically active microbe screening

Microbial fuel cells (MFCs) have recently generated great interests in the bioenergy community because of their potentials in powering varieties of devices and for wastewater treatment. Optimization of MFC designs, exploring more electrochemically active microbes ('electricigens'), and examining their optimum operating conditions are attractive ways to increase power generation and efficiencies of MFCs. High throughput parallel analysis will greatly accelerate these studies. Here we describe an air-cathode MFC array that consist of 24 miniaturized air-cathode MFC systems on a chip format. The 5 7.5 cm chip use oxygen in ambient air as electron acceptor and was used to conduct parallel screening of environmental microbes to find those with high electricity generation abilities. A screening of 2,000 species from Summerville Lake (TX) and Brazos River (TX) successfully discovered three electricigen species that generated higher power than the reference strain Shewanella oneidensis MR-1. The screening result was confirmed with a conventional H-type MFC.

Air-cathode microbial fuel cell array for electrochemically active microbe screening Conference Paper