Microbial Fuel Cells: Plug-in and Power-on Microbiology These devices already prove valuable for characterizing physiology,modeling electron flow, and framing and testing hypotheses

摘要

If scientists have their way, "green" beerwon't be limited to St. Patrick's Daycelebrations anymore. Breweries are tak-ing their wastewater, which is rich inorganic material, and turning it into elec-tricity with bacteria in microbial fuel cells(MFCs). MFCs can generate valuable commod-ities from a variety of organic wastes that areabundant and essentially free— bacteria havegenerated electricity from industrial wastewa-ters, sewage, and even sediment. In MFCs, bac-teria act as living catalysts to convert organicsubstrates into electricity. While this technology may sound like an answer to our energy crisis,MFCs are not yet viable for most applications.Ongoing research is dedicated to optimizingtheir performance, with only recent attentionbeing given to the microbial details of waste-to-wattage conversion.